General Discussion

markpkessinger

(8,401 posts) Mon Jun 22, 2015, 06:29 PM Jun 2015

Taking down a wingnut who said Charleston shootings were intended to target Christians . . .

. . .an exchange with another reader in the comments to E.J. Dionne's Washington Post column, Charleston and the Politics of Evasion:

censorshipisbliss
12:35 PM EDT

The leftist radicals only see race. They seem to be ignoring the fact that those killed were Christians. Though as we found out in news from Syria and Iraq, most liberals don't care about the murdering of Christians. Its too bad the ones in Syria or Iraq were not reported to have been black or then we might see some level of perceived outrage from the left.

markpkessinger
3:16 PM EDT
If you really want to see how absurd the reasoning must be in order to enable one to arrive at the conclusion that the shooter may have been targeting Christians, consider a hypothetical, parallel story that occurs outside of any question of racial motivation. Let's suppose there were some individual who harbored an intense, irrational hatred of, say, men with freckled faces. So he thinks about where he might be able to find a lot of them gathered in once place. No obvious choices come to mind, so he figures he'll go to the local Wal-Mart, figuring there is sure to be more than one, just by virtue of the volume of foot traffic. Turns out it is his lucky day, and he finds six men with freckled faces at Wal-Mart, whereupon he shoots and kills them all.

After the shooting, an eyewitness reports that as he was shooting, he was speaking of the necessity of taking out men with freckled faces. What's more, it is discovered he has a history of association with hate groups who target people with freckled faces, and his social media postings also turn out to demonstrate an obsessive hatred of folks with freckles. Any finally, when he is apprehended, he confesses to police that his desire was to kill men with freckled faces. But some conservative media outlets, uncomfortable as they are with discussions of anti-freckled bigotry, suggest instead that the shooter was targeting Wal-Mart stores. That is EXACTLY the same as what you are doing in suggesting this shooter was targeting Christians.

And yes, it is THAT absurd!