Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Tamir Rice was murdered by two Cleveland police officers in 2014. Even with video showing the officers murdered the 12 year old, the prosecutor announced this week that neither officer would be indicted for murder. He called the unfortunate incident an accident. Really? Two officers murdering a young boy is like getting into a traffic accident? It just shows how biased the ‘justice’ system is in Cleveland.
Donald Trump continued his Internet comment section campaign for the Presidency by offering an idea to ban Muslims from entering the US. While a majority of normal Americans and most of the other GOP presidential candidates rejected his idea, it seems some of them forgot that not even a month ago they advocated keeping out refugees from Syria due to unfounded worries that Syrian immigrants were terrorists. We know that logic fails the GOP more times than not, but you can’t complain about Syrian refugees AND complain about Trump’s plan to ban Muslims.
A conservative friend of mine posted an Islamophobic anti-refugee Meme on Facebook the other day. The text on the image claims that the Prophet Muhammad, the Jesus of Islam, was taken in by the Jewish city of Medina and within five years he had driven out, killed, or enslaved all the Jews. The accusation sounded so ridiculous I had to try and verify it. Of course the ‘facts’ in the meme were very wrong.
A copy of the meme is to the right of this article (and a full size version is at the end of this post) but if you can’t see the image below is the full quote used:
Back in 2013, when the Ohio legislature was considering a budget bill that contained some onerous abortion restrictions, reproductive rights advocates urged supporters to ask the Governor to line-item veto the restrictions. At the time he seemed he hadn’t decided what he would do but in the end he let the restrictions stand. Administration emails, recently obtained by the AP, show the Governor’s staff helped write the restrictions. The Governor lied about being neutral.
Last week there were protests at the University of Missouri that led to the resignation of the school’s President for not responding to incidents of racism on campus. After the good that came from that organized action I was bothered by the treatment of student journalists by protesters who were biased just because of past treatment of their issues by other journalists. Discussion of controversial issues can’t happen with silence and/or censorship. Creating a bubble in public as a safe-space doesn’t actually resolve problems, it creates more of them.