{"id":29356,"date":"2014-12-26T10:54:36","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T15:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29356"},"modified":"2014-12-26T10:54:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T15:54:36","slug":"a-close-encounter-with-an-almost-kinda-sorta-hate-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/12\/26\/a-close-encounter-with-an-almost-kinda-sorta-hate-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"A close encounter with an almost-kinda-sorta hate crime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.steynonline.com\/4722\/the-multicultural-departure-lounge\" target=\"_blank\">Mark Steyn<\/a> on how the brave and timely action of a &#8220;special-events employee&#8221; in Riverside California just barely averted a horrific hate-ish crime-ish:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I passed through Shannon Airport in Ireland the other day. They&#8217;ve got a &#8220;holiday&#8221; display in the terminal, but guess what? It says &#8220;Merry Christmas.&#8221; The Emerald Isle has a few Jews, and these days rather a lot of Muslims, and presumably even a militant atheist or two, but they don&#8217;t seem inclined to sue the bejasus out of every event in the Yuletide season. By contrast, the Associated Press reports the following from Riverside, Calif.:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>A high school choir was asked to stop singing Christmas carols during an ice skating show featuring Olympic medalist Sasha Cohen out of concern the skater would be offended&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hasten to add this Sasha Cohen is not the Sacha Baron Cohen of the hit movie <em>Borat<\/em>. The Olympic S. Cohen is a young lady; the <em>Borat<\/em> S. Cohen is a man, though his singlet would not be out of place in a louche Slav entry to the ice-dancing pairs. Likewise, the skater-puts-carols-on-ice incident seems as sharply satirical of contemporary America as anything in <em>Borat<\/em>, at least in its distillation of the coerciveness of &#8220;tolerance&#8221;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>A city staff member, accompanied by a police officer, approached the Rubidoux High School Madrigals at the Riverside Outdoor Ice Skating Rink just as they launched into &#8216;God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen&#8217; and requested that the troupe stop singing&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The cop and the staffer &mdash; &#8220;special-events employee Michelle Baldwin&#8221; &mdash; were not acting on a complaint from the celebrity skater. They were just taking offense on her behalf, no doubt deriving a kinky vicarious thrill at preventing a hypothetical &#8220;hate crime.&#8221; The young miss is Jewish, and so they assumed that the strains of &#8220;Merry Gentlemen&#8221; wafting across the air must be an abomination to her. In fact, if you go to <em>sashacohen.com<\/em>, you&#8217;ll see the headline: &#8220;Join Sasha On Her Christmas Tree Lighting Tour.&#8221; That&#8217;s right, she&#8217;s going round the country skating at Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. Christmas tree lighting ceremonies accompanied by singers singing Christmas music that uses the C word itself &mdash; just like Sasha does on her Web site.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, the Special Events Commissar and her Carol Cop swung into action and decided to act <em>in loco Cohenis<\/em> and go loco. Many of my fellow pundits find themselves fighting vainly the old ennui when it comes to the whole John Gibson &#8220;War On Christmas&#8221; shtick, but I think they&#8217;re missing something: The idea of calling a cop to break up the singing of &#8220;God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen&#8221; would strike most of the planet as insane.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Steyn on how the brave and timely action of a &#8220;special-events employee&#8221; in Riverside California just barely averted a horrific hate-ish crime-ish: I passed through Shannon Airport in Ireland the other day. They&#8217;ve got a &#8220;holiday&#8221; display in the terminal, but guess what? It says &#8220;Merry Christmas.&#8221; The Emerald Isle has a few Jews, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,11],"tags":[35,345,446,200,351],"class_list":["post-29356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-religion","tag-california","tag-christmas","tag-judaism","tag-music","tag-politicalcorrectness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Du","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29357,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29356\/revisions\/29357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}