Welcome to Inclusive San Francisco 

My brother-in-law Shannon and I have had several conversations about this sort of thing... people who hate. People who are bigoted... and why we allow them to speak. Many times it seems as if he's convinced that all bigoted, racist, ill-thinking people live in the Midwest and South. Whenever you hear about the KKK, or the Neo-Nazis, or some other hate spouting group after all, it seems to be a bunch of white country hicks hollering their madness in a corn field right?

I have always maintained that such thinking is easily found anywhere with just a little bit of searching. In fact, I abhor restrictions on free speech because, if for no other reason, it saves us work. We don't have to go looking for rotten, bigoted people if we allow them to speak. They'll show themselves to us. In fact, letting them speak, and allowing that speech to degenerate into hate for all to see is just handing them rope to hang themselves with. With that said... a columnist in San Francisco has done just that for himself:

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. Wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that's making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land. Or is it?

H/T to Vista on Current Events for the pointer. You can also find a thorough fisking of this column at Military Matters... though personally I think the article is so awful and disgusting, it really needs no fisking. Sadly, there are some who probably agree with what is being said in it.

I have to wonder... what could cause someone to hold that much hate over a family who's only "crime" seems to be not only wanting children, but having many of them? If you can support them... which they seem perfectly capable of doing without government support, where is the crime? And why do you hate them so much?