During Halloween, What's Good For The Noose Is Good For The Gander by Doug Wrenn

During Halloween, What's Good For The Noose Is Good For The Gander

By Doug Wrenn

October 26, 2007

Halloween, meet Christmas. I can almost remember the exact time that "Merry Christmas" suddenly became taboo, despite the million or so times I must have heard that loving and charitable greeting innocuously exchanged in the past. Ditto with seeing hanging ghouls on display at Halloween time. But in Stratford, one particular such display brought out the real ghouls. We have just reached another speech-restricting milestone in political correctness, and certainly not for the better.

I actually happened to drive by the other day as Channel 8 was filming a live broadcast from what appeared to be a well thought out and rather expensive Halloween display in a residential neighborhood. I figured the 8ers were doing a typical human-interest puff & fluff piece on the elaborate holiday display. The story however, had no cheer, and for once, Channel 8 was actually reporting news.

Part of the display at the home of Joyce Mounajed and Jennifer Cervero included a ghoul hanging from a noose. Unfortunately for the unknowing homeowners, the complexion of the ghoul was a wee bit too dark for local black Baptist preacher Johnny Gamble of the "Friendship" Baptist Church. If Rev. Johnny Gamble represents "friendship," now I know why President Truman advised getting a dog.

Gamble started rolling this fabricated snowball downhill when he complained of the display to Stratford Police, and to the homeowners. According to Richard Weizel's October 22nd online piece in the Connecticut Post, "Complaints Bring 'Hanging Man' Down," Gamble confronted the homeowners, exclaiming, "Suppose my great-great grandfather were lynched, like thousands of blacks before were!" Let's not suppose anything, Rev. Gamble, was he lynched or not?

The United States Constitution guarantees the right to free expression. It does not guarantee the right for anyone to not be offended. If it did, rest assured that Imus would be in prison right now for his recent radio tirade, and his tier-mates would be the many so-called hip-hop and rap artists who use the same words and worse in their moronic and putrid song lyrics. Gamble claiming that a grandfather of several generations before could have been lynched suggests that he was not, and if so, Gamble's apparently sought-after offense is about as valid as blacks seeking reparations for slavery when the last living slave died decades ago. During the potato famine, I probably had way-back-when relatives who came here seeking a better life, only to be told, "Irish need not apply" when they sought employment. Where's my feel-good reparations check? Blacks were not only oppressed with nooses. During the civil rights protests of the 60's, they had police dogs and fire hoses turned on them as well. Does Rev. "Turn The Other Cheek" Johnny also take umbrage to German Shepherds and fire apparatus as well? Speaking of "fire" and "umbrage," I wonder, is there a cross in Rev. Gamble's church?

A case could be made that the homeowners had their rights almost violated under the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments. First, they were asked to take the display down. By coincidence (wink, wink, nod, nod), other clergy, civil rights so-called leaders (I must have missed that election) and police soon got involved. Originally, the homeowners stuck to their guns and refused to take down the display. Then they painted the face of the ghoul white instead of brown. (I guess the perceived lynching Caucasians is OK.) Then they had a closed door meeting with Mayor James Miron and Police Chief John Burtula as well as unnamed "community leaders." (Another election I must have missed!) The homeowners then voluntarily agreed, under what was tantamount to near coercion, to take the display down. That's a shame. Now having been successfully bullied, these homeowners have publicly declared that they are easy pickings for the next bully with a synthetic cause. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in a police station, request to be arrested. If a law was broken, the homeowners should have been arrested, and probably would have been arrested. They should have even demanded to be arrested. The cops got their wish in the end, because they surely had no case, and after Chief Burtula consulted with the State's Attorney's Office, that fact was confirmed, which explains all the talking. Sadly, the beleaguered homeowners, who understandably desired some semblance of peace in their own neighborhood, never called the bluff. Gamble wasn't bluffing. If he didn't get his way, he threatened a "massive protest," a rather odd threat, considering that he supposedly objects to any appearance of blacks "hanging around" the property. Nevertheless, the freedom of expression is apparently only a "black or white" issue in Stratford.

Even Craig Kelly, President of the greater Bridgeport chapter of the NAACP (AKA: the "National Association Against Caucasians And Police") acknowledged and confirmed what the homeowners said, that no racism was ever intended. Kelly expounded that ignorance was the problem. And how, ignorance of the Constitution. If reverse discrimination and cowardice were capital crimes, there would be a few more filled nooses hanging in Stratford right now.

It's with this same mindset that those cute but now obsolete little jockey statues have since disappeared from front lawns of suburbia. You know, those popular little black ceramic fellows holding the lanterns. Just before the last little black jockey went the way of the dinosaur and the Confederate flag, that other misconstrued symbol that epitomizes states' rights as much as slavery, the remaining few statues were re-painted with white faces. Again, if they are so racist, how does ridiculing whites instead of blacks create equality? Apparently, racism, like "offense" is in the eye (and/or agenda) of the beholder. As legend has it, the jockey statues once symbolized secret safe havens of the underground railroad, which if memory serves me correctly, was run by white abolitionists to aid escaped southern black slaves in heading north to procure their liberty. Those racist white devils!

Kelly spun this Halloween display into the race card by making a connection to the Jena 6 case, and his alleged concern regarding a racist group in Stratford known as "The White Wolves." His reasoning, if that is what it even is, is ludicrous. There seems to be little dispute regarding the tumultuous racism that exists in Jena, Louisiana, but the (black) "6" in question allegedly beat and kicked a lone white boy well into unconsciousness. Newsflash, folks, if six people start beating and kicking an armed person, that person is legally well within his right to shoot his attackers. Six people beating and kicking one person both is, and justifies lethal force. While taunting nooses were hung from a tree in Jena, that in no way justifies 6 people beating someone to near death, especially when there is no concrete connection between the nooses and this boy, and even if there was a connection, that in no way justifies what amounts to attempted murder. But black activists are about as concerned about that as they were about Reginald Denny during the OJ days. I know. Go ahead and tell me about "equality" again. The current activists are in an uproar about the Jena 6 being tried as adults. If you're old enough to almost kill someone like an adult, then you're old enough to be tried as an adult, whether you're white, black, green or purple. As for the "White Wolves," I am not familiar with them (or their music). The gist I get however, is that the White Wolves are up to something at least slightly more sinister than Halloween decorating.

Kelly also threatened to identify the manufacturer of the Halloween display. Here we go again! Talk to any number of gun manufacturers, and they will most likely predict for you what happens next. (Hint: Think Vladimir Putin vs. journalists!) What's next, we outlaw rope?

I just don't get it. Whatever happened to the good old days, when if something (really) offended you, you simply avoided it or looked the other way? Even if I was black and lived in that Stratford neighborhood, I think I could tolerate the depiction of a hanging ghoul of any color on private property long before I would ever tolerate a publicly funded institution, like the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York desecrating icons of my religious faith and calling it "art." Last I heard, Baptists believe in Jesus and Mary, too, and when their images were adorned with elephant feces and immersed in urine on the public dime in that oversized compost heap that dares to call itself a museum, I didn't hearing Rev. Johnny threatening any "massive protests" then.

Matters of race have now boiled down to an inane but trendy "zero tolerance" policy, which equates to zero common sense. The real problem isn't the color of skin; it's the lack of thickness of the skin. When someone truly wishes to harass, threaten or intimidate someone because of race, the motive is usually quite clear. Racism, like sexual harassment and ethnic jokes, is not an all or nothing situation. These matters are defined by intent as well as circumstances. But common sense went to Hell when we instituted "hate crimes," only applied to crimes against certain self-titled "victim" groups, but with heavier sanctions than laws already existing on the books for the same crimes committed against, say, straight, white conservative, Christian males of European descent. In our excessive and obsessive quest for equality, we have created inequality, in which certain groups of people in the penal code are more or less important than other groups of people. If you are wondering how this unintended (or intended) consequence happens, just look at cowardice personified, in the form of Mayor Miron and Chief Burtula, two spineless collaborators who also encroached upon trampling on the Constitution just to placate mob rule. This incident in Stratford is not about equality between blacks and whites. Like in many other places and in many other circumstances, it is about retribution against whites by grudge-holding blacks for true atrocities that were not only foisted upon blacks by whites, but also later ended for blacks by whites. Not that Burtula or Miron should be faulted. After all, these Stratford public officials were just following orders, kind of like what some other bureaucratic hacks said they were doing not all that long ago in another place called Nuremberg.

I seriously wonder what "Reverend" Johnny Gamble says in his sermons to his congregation on Sunday mornings when it's time to preach about forgiveness. I also wonder how he sleeps at night after delivering such sermons. After all, what he thinks he saw in a noose was clearly a "stretch." Even if his grandfather from several generations ago was lynched, one thing is for sure; Mounajed and Cervero weren't the ones who lynched him. This façade is not about offense. It's about agenda, and the vehicle to facilitate that agenda is the seeking or feigning of offense. This corrosive trend does not heal our racial divides; it opens them further and creates new ones. What guys like Gamble and Kelly are doing, with the help of feckless political puppets like Miron and Burtula, who so desperately crave being liked over leading, is not healing scars, but festering sores. This tsunami of black oppression against whites will not end until we reacquaint ourselves with the usage of the word, "no." As the saying goes, "Build it and they will come." Indeed. Build a phony right, such as the phony right to not be "offended," legitimately or otherwise, and the conniving predators and the opportunistic mooches who follow them will emerge in increasing masses like cockroaches on the floor to raining food morsels from above. This is not equality. It's tyranny, and whether carried out by whites to blacks or blacks to whites, it's just as ugly, and just as enveloping and consuming. Political correctness, and the collective cowardice and ignorance that supports it sucks liberty out of our lives with the same devastation as if it were instead sucking oxygen out of the room. The tactics used by this gaggle of sanctimonious censors are not at all new. Many despots in many other regimes have used similar such tactics throughout history to stifle speech and procure power. Racism is colorblind. Beware of wolves (of any color) in sheep's clothing, or for that matter, modern day Pharisees who preach revenge, but pitch it as sensitivity and/or equality.

In the parlance of the current season, I believe this practice is otherwise known as, "Trick or Treat!"

Doug Wrenn