“Open Season on Protestors? (well, except for Jan. 6 rioters)” Dec. 5, 2021
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor click here to see the video
Jamala Rogers in the LA Progressive In a recent SNL’s Weekend Update sketch, Michael Che joked if there was a “white tears law school” that teaches white men how to cry their way out of trouble. Che was referring to Kyle Rittenhouse’s over-the-top tearful testimony during his recent trial. It is likely that the dramatic performance swayed his white-jury-minus-one-Black.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has overshadowed the shooting of Jacob Blake by a white Kenosha cop in 2020. Blake was shot several times in the back, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed. Blake is unlikely to get real justice in his case. The Justice Department has already ruled it would not be seeking charges against the officer involved.
Rittenhouse has become the poster child for blue lives matter. We surely can’t say he values all white lives. The junior vigilante shot and killed two men and attempted to kill others – all who were white. He faced five felony charges and one misdemeanor. Those felony charges carry up to 65 years in prison although he’s unlikely to get the full brunt of those sentences. His age, race and tears are big mitigating factors.
It would typically be a mistake to think of me as being naïve. I’m way too read into the news and way to jaded by recent events to have been entirely shocked by the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, but innocent on all counts? Really? There was some testimony and even some video to support his claim of self-defense but, innocent on all counts? No way!
On his November 23rd show, Stephen Colbert expressed exactly what I was feeling that night. If what Kyle Rittenhouse actually didn’t break any laws, then, clearly, the laws need to be changed. I’m not a lawyer. I wasn’t on the jury. I didn’t even watch the wall to wall coverage of the trial. Maybe he really did fear for his life . . . morally, maybe he should have. A punk 17 year old kid taking a military styled rifle across state lines into an emotionally charged demonstration, strutting around like a peacock, trying to posture himself as some kind of a threatening right-wing vigilante. . . honestly, I could see myself in that situation trying to disarm him forcefully, certainly not to shoot him with his own weapon, but to take it from him and send him home with my boot leaving a bruise on his punk behind for placing people in danger with his lethal phallic symbol. Forgive me if that is too much, but I am just telling you how I feel.
This tragic event in Kenosha was the culmination of years of increasingly liberalized gun laws that have allowed for open carry of lethal weapons in public. No longer has the second amendment been reserved for those who want to defend their home against criminal invasion. Now, we see people in fast food restaurants and grocery stores, armed as if they are going to war.
On Tuesday of this week, a 15 year old boy, a boy with no known beef with fellow students, no history of mental health issues, no record of criminal conduct, just took his dad’s 4-day-old handgun to his school near Detroit and shot and killed four people and wounded 8 others for reasons that just are not immediately clear. Recently, another assailant sprayed a public park in Colorado, near where my daughter walks her dog every day. Six people were non-critically wounded but dozens of shots were fired, and many people could have died.
Our nation is awash in guns, hundreds of millions of guns, most of which will never be used against anyone and yet, more than 41,000 have died this year, with more than 100,000 others wounded. People all over the world still want to come to America for economic opportunity, but still, the whole world looks at us with a sad awareness that we have become a nation on the verge of insanity.
In 1994, assault weapons were banned in the USA but the provision included a sunset clause in 10 years that allowed sales of these weapons to resume if not renewed by congress. By 2004, the political environment had changed, and even after the Sandy Hood massacre of elementary school students in 2012, almost 20 years ago, America has never mustered the obviously needed political will to renew the ban. A country that can’t even protect little children from such nightmares has to be crazy at a truly evil way.
It has been my honor to be close friends with three full colonels, highly trained military men, none of whom owned guns because, they each explained to me at different times over the past 30 years, that guns are dangerous. I worked briefly as a journalist for Missouri’s National Guard, I officed on Ft Leonard Wood where it was obvious that even trained soldiers were not allowed to have weapons on the military base because, allowing soldiers who were in constant training to walk around armed would be dangerous. People who know how to handle these weapons are not allowed to carry them around, but a 17-year-old with a super-hero complex, could walk into an emotionally charged setting with a gun he had no business having.
So, folks, maybe Kyle Rittenhouse was technically “innocent” under current laws, but, clearly, America isn’t innocent. America, its Congress, its Senate, its state legislatures, its NRA members and gun owners, and probably all of the rest of us who have not rationally voted and lobbied our elected officials, we’re all guilty as sin.
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, famously charged with transporting teenaged girls across state lines for sex, said his office may ask Rittenhouse to consider working on Capitol Hill as an intern. Without shame or fear of party censure, he said,
“Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern.” He continued, “We may reach out to him and see if he’d be interested in helping the country in additional ways.” That Matt Gaetz is still a popular elected official speaks to the weakness of our democracy and the moral depravity of Florida voters.
An August 2019 Fox News poll of registered voters found 90% of respondents favored universal background checks, 81% supported taking guns from at-risk individuals, and 67% favored banning assault weapons. No president since George Washington, who ran unopposed, has won election with a 67% margin. 67% of us want an assault weapon ban and yet a minority manages to keep these weapons legally on the market. It must be the election donations of a fraction of Americans who keep these weapons in our schools, parks, grocery stores, and restaurants. . . it is money over morality and yet, we are all guilty of allowing it to go on.
I am not a lawyer, but I am a preacher, and I must quote the ancient Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, who said to his contemporaries (Jeremiah 6:13-15a) “For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone lies. . . saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush.”
I am ashamed of America, and I am ashamed to be counted among them.
It isn’t just Republicans but Reid J. Epstein and Patricia Mazzei wrote in the
June 16, 2021 New York Times: Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets.
A Republican proposal in Oklahoma would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance.
And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that toughened existing laws governing public disorder and created a harsh new level of infractions — a bill he’s called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”
Can anyone among us say that Jeremiah’s 3000 year old sermon does not deserve to be heard in every pulpit, seen in every American newspaper today? “For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone lies. . . saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush.”
I did my master’s thesis in the treatment of addiction. The years that I spent going to AA, Alanon, and NA meetings, the year I spent working in the addiction treatment center at the VA in Nashville, taught me a lot about the kind of alternative universe that addicts and alcoholics live in. For many of them, time is not linear, it is only right now. What you did for them yesterday or what they did to their family and friends yesterday, simply does not exist. In fact, they will often look at you like you are crazy if you even bring it up. All that matters to them is right now. They take no responsibility for their own actions and they think that you are persecuting them if you bring up anything that they did in the past. You are the evil one, just for remembering when they stole your car and drove it into the neighbor’s living room.
If you allow them to, they will drag you into the insanity of their alternative universe and you actually start to think like them. If you can even get them to talk about it at all, they will insist that you somehow made them steal their car and drive it into the neighbor’s living room. It is your fault and you should be ashamed of yourself.
They believe in their alternative universe so much, it is easy to fall into believing it with them. What I have realized in recent years that it is not only meth, OxyContin, fentanyl, or alcohol that makes people retreat into an alternative universe. People get addicted to money. People get addicted to power. And they love their drug. . . money can become power and power can become money and you are evil if you get in their way of acquiring both.
I remember sitting in a local restaurant in the fall of 2008 as an older man was trying to convince the young woman at his table not to vote for Barak Obama that November. She was telling him that she believed it was time for a change. Quite rationally, she was saying that Bush had gotten us into two unnecessary and expensive wars, and that it was time for America to get over its history of a “whites only Presidency.” But he countered her, emphatically saying, “Sure, Bush has made a lot of mistakes and America has a real problem with race, but here is the bigger issue. If Obama gets elected, he will try to take away all of our guns and that will start a Civil War.”
I managed to remain quiet, and he managed to convince her that Obama would take everyone’s guns. Of course, similar power and money addicts have claimed that Carter was going to take all of our guns, that Clinton would take all of our guns, that Obama, or Biden would take all of our guns. And no one ever seems to remember that conservatives have made that claim against every democratic candidate for 50 years and no one ever actually takes anyone’s guns.
In the same way, they try to say that buildings being burned in a Black Lives Matter demonstration is a national tragedy but an attempted overthrow of the government of the United States, along with deaths and millions of dollars of damage done to the Capital Building was just another normal tourist day in January. They want you to believe that every time a cop kills an unarmed black man that man needed to be killed. They insist that our founding fathers wrote the second amendment so that some punk kid could take a semi-automatic weapon into a crowd and innocently shoot and kill a couple of people.
And here is the real kicker, they tell you that you are a dangerous radical leftist because you don’t think that untrained civilians should be able to buy military styled weapons. And they get politicians and preachers to join them in crazy town, defending gun rights, gun lobbyist political bribes, and paranoid interpretations of reality.
People, Cater, Clinton, Obama, and Biden are not after your guns. Now, Roger Ray, Roger Ray wants to take your guns from you. Assault rifles, if they should be anywhere, should be in the armory of the military. Hand guns are manufactured to kill people. That is what they are for. If you want fewer people to be killed, we should get rid of hand guns. And if you are such a bad shot that you need a rifle that can hold dozens of rounds of ammunition, maybe you should take up pickleball because hunting just isn’t for you.
We still live in the remnants of a democracy. The majority of us do not want assault rifles on our streets. Most of us want to see our elected officials do what they can to reduce gun deaths and I believe that we could successfully outlaw hand guns. And I believe that insurrection is a crime and should be treated as such. And I believe that demonstration is free speech and as such is vital to maintaining a democracy and that you can’t run your car through a crowd of demonstrators and remain free. And politicians who try to turn murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse into conservative heroes need to go back to selling used cars in Florida because they can’t be trusted to be in our Congress.
That’s just my opinion, I just so happen to be right.
