I’ll just say this. It’s not that councilmember Tim O’Hare can’t continue his barely veiled bigotry in Farmers Branch by saying whatever he wants. That includes the preposterous linking of his anti-illegal immigrant campaign to the multi-decade civil rights struggles that included the efforts of Rosa Parks in the Montgomery bus boycott and the life-consuming work by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, if you recall, was shot to death on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike by garbage workers. O’Hare, a politician, can even lie–no surprise there.
But equating his right to lie with some kind of alleged effort to suppress speech lacks any foundation whatsoever in the world of reality. I don’t know if O’Hare “committed a sin” against “American Newspeak” (what is this, a militia site?), but he is being historically inaccurate. It’s the responsibility of journalists and writers to call out lying politicians for their lies (as O’Hare was called out by Macarena Hernandez at the DMN for saying he hadn’t had any undocumented clients at his law firm prior to all this hoo-ha). It’s not suppression, it’s fact-checking.
There is, of course, zero possibility that King or Parks or any other civil rights proponents, most of whom were physically beaten, bombed, shot, jailed and harassed by police, FBI and corrupt local courts, would ever endorse the O’Hare referendum or anything he stands for. If O’Hare or anyone else around here needs background on the position of King or Parks or the entire civil rights campaign, I’d recommend at least the first volume of this series as a good place to start.
