Me neither. But so saith right-wing Hawai'i columnist Jerry Coffee, thusly:
http://www.midweek.com/content/columns/coffeebreak_article/an_insane_civil_rights_conceptThese are but a few of the examples which have formed the slippery slope to our society's present embrace of a person's "civil right" to be insane! And not just to "be" insane, but to be immune from involuntary treatment. It is common knowledge, for example, that a very high percentage of our homeless population require treatment for mental illness, the very illness that keeps them incapable of choosing the treatment that could cure them. I have personal experience with a young adult suffering from severe delusional schizophrenia, who is immune to reason concerning the need for care or medication, and whom the mental health staff at Castle hospital is unable to help because they cannot legally hold or even medicate patients involuntarily even though, when released, they are sure to drift further into homelessness and danger.
If all of this is beginning to sound familiar, it should. It is this very same perverse, politically correct interpretation of "civil rights" that contributed to the Virginia Tech massacre by the obviously mentally ill killer, Cho Seung-Hui. This is a significant sidebar to the story we've not yet seen.
By now we are all familiar with the virtual parade of red flags that should have - no, did - tip off VaTech authorities to this young man’s dangerous propensities: anger, resentment and blame, hostility and other antisocial behavior, dark and threatening writings in English classes, a stalker, a "loner." But unlike with the Columbine High School shooters before him, all of this was reported by Cho's fellow students (declining to press charges for stalking), teachers ("the most disturbed student in 20 years of teaching") and even the campus police, who referred him to a judge who found him "mentally ill and a danger to himself" and prescribed counseling.
Through all of this, mostly through preoccupation with Cho's civil rights, there was no proactive follow-up: compulsory counseling, compulsory medication - not even as a precondition to continued VaTech enrollment - and certainly no consideration of involuntary, short-term institutionalization, based upon the judge's assessment, to protect Cho from himself.:puke:
What a douchebag. Plus, he's wrong on the facts: a judge did in fact refer Cho to outpatient counseling, which Cho never attended. Like so many other people with mental illness, he simply fell through the cracks. And who, I ask you, left the mental health system so threadbare as to allow this to happen? Why, that'd be the repuke party -- the same repuke party for which douchebag Coffee
ran for our legislature, losing by a razor-thin 50-vote margin. :scared:
edit: that'd