The Paula Deen debacle reminds me of a joke I heard as a boy:
Jesus is preaching when he is interrupted by a throng of men
dragging a woman. "Teacher," one of the men says, “this woman
committed adultery. What should we do with her?"
Jesus replies, "Let he who is
without sin cast the first stone."
Moments later, a little old lady pushes her way through the
crowd, picks up a giant rock and hurls it at the adultress, smacking her upside the head and causing her to collapse.
Jesus sighs as he turns to the old lady. “Mother, I was
trying to make a
point here.”
point here.”
So am I. My point is this: There isn’t anyone screaming bloody
murder about Paula Deen who hasn’t uttered a racial slur or, at the very least,
laughed at a joke that belittled someone’s ethnicity or essence. You know the
kind of slurs I’m referring to – wops, spics, cannucks, krauts, cheese-eating
surrender monkeys, polocks, slopeheads, dotheads, towelheads, zips, nips, micks, crackers,
hymies, haoles, chinks, camel-jocks, kikes, dykes, oreos, goyim and there are
others this honky peckerwood gringo could list if I were so inclined but I’m not.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning the word Ms. Deen
allegedly used in a deposition. It’s a word that is
particularly hurtful and offensive to African-Americans and, given our nation’s bitter racial history, many
Americans are more sensitive to it than they are to slurs against other ethnicities.
Much of the blame for the word’s continued existence can be placed on the
founding fathers who, when drawing up the Constitution, could have (past tense
of racial slur for a person of Japanese descent) the problem in the bud by
outlawing slavery at the get-go but instead deferred the matter to be determined
by future generations. The result? The bitterest, most deadly war in American history that
left a divide we like to pretend no longer exists but does. If our country had
truly been founded as a nation in which all people were created equal, the word
would have disappeared generations ago. But ours, alas, isn’t a perfect nation.
No nation is.
Ms. Deen has gone on TV and begged for forgiveness, endless
stories have been written about the incident, sponsors and the Food Network have given her a drop kick, and tens of thousands of Americans
have registered their own opinions on message boards.
Here's mine. It's something I wouldn’t have
said in my younger days when I was more judgmental than I am now that I realize
that nobody, especially me, is perfect. Let's forgive Ms. Deen, put the story to rest and instead focus on matters more
important, such as a government that’s making a mockery of our civil liberties.
We Americans are a forgiving people. We drive Mercedes built by Germans
who turned the other way as their government killed six million Jews. Not to
mention Nissans and Toyotas built by people whose military bombed Pearl
Harbor, staged the death march to Bataan and other atrocities. Former Congressman
Anthony Wiener, who had to resign after tweeting a picture of his dick, stands a good chance of becoming New
York’s next mayor. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who
once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, went on to become a revered member of the
Democratic Party and U.S. Senate. We’ve forgiven Martha Stewart. We should forgive Paula Deen, too.
Unless, of course, you're without sin, in which case you are free to hurl away.
