HuffPo defends Ballduster McSoulpatch

Daniel sent us a link to the Huffington Post this morning in which four (count ’em, four) peckerwood students from Yale University’s LGBT Litigation Project, Taylor Asen, Jeffrey Gurrola, Ramya Kasturi and Larry Kornreich, defend Patrick McManus (known here as Ballduster McSoulpatch) from the evil government. Read this bullshit;

A lifelong advocate of gay rights and a onetime victim of the United States military’s outdated and discriminatory policies towards homosexuals, McManus knew as much as anyone what an amazing achievement it was to elect a gay mayor in a major U.S. city, and especially in deep red Texas. At the same time, however, he knew that this was only one small step towards equal rights for the LGBT community. That night, McManus decided to attend the public celebration in honor of Parker’s victory. As a reminder to the gay community and the people of Houston of the lingering effects of discrimination, McManus donned a military uniform and an array of medals. Wearing this outfit, he went to Parker’s celebration party. When it was over, he went home.

Of course, a saner person might have thought that wearing HIS OWN uniform with HIS OWN array of medals might have made a better statement. But McManus has never been accused of being rational. Remember that he once tried to pass himself off as an air marshall – was that a statement of his gay pride, too?

The Stolen Valor Act is in clear violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of expression. Michael McManus engaged in an act of political expression, challenging a discriminatory and archaic policy that the U.S. military maintains — Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that political speech is at the core of the First Amendment’s protections. McManus’s outfit that night was over-the-top: he wore no fewer than 27 medals and badges, both U.S. and foreign. After a single glance at his photo it would be ludicrous to assert that anyone actually thought that it was anything but a costume.

Of course, it’s difficult to imagine that a group of college students, who’ve never earned anything in their miserable, sheltered lives, to understand the meaning behind the medals that the flamboyant McManus chose to wear, but they have to be doltish if they think that McManus wore them as some sort of political statement…especially when a literate person can read for themselves how he represented himself alternately as a lieutenant colonel and a brigadier general. How he made up details of his miserable military career to push a political agenda and to attract small Asian men to his bed.

How does wearing things he didn’t earn and representing himself as an expert on military issues when he left the military when Ronald Reagan was president and we were still fighting the Soviet Union?

One might argue that a military medal has more value or less value than a flag, but it is precisely such distinctions that we do not want Congress to make. It should not be for Congress to decide that certain objects’ symbolic value warrants trampling on the right of American citizens to engage in free speech.

So now we want free speech to include fraud? Our legislature which attempts to call rape interstate commerce can’t regulate “symbolic value” of the items it authorizes to distribute? Does that mean that our government can’t mint money, too? After all, money has “symbolic value”.

Furthermore, even if the government has a permissible interest in protecting these medals from fraudulent adornment, the language of the statute casts a much broader net. By disallowing any wearing of the medals or uniform, without regard to purpose, the statute prevents not only political expression, but also acts as harmless as wearing a military-themed costume for Halloween.

Yeah, Ballduster wasn’t at a Halloween party, or even a costume party – it was at a political function and he was wearing the uniform, not to make a political point, but to add to his own “symbolic value”.

It is the right to engage in unpopular speech — speech challenging the status quo, which the angry mob or the tyrannical government would be tempted to suppress — that the First Amendment protects for all of us. When that protection is denied to one person, it is denied to us all.

His speech doesn’t challenge the status quo or anything else – he wore stuff he didn’t earn – he stole. And what about protecting the honor of people who HAVE earned the privilege to wear the items that Ballduster stole? Don’t they have rights, too, you imbeciles.

There’s a reason they call them students – they have a lot to learn.

Category: Phony soldiers