Iqra’i

Much as I hate to contradict Chuck Norris, he’s way off base. Condemning the Day of Silence, he writes:

…Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson’s views were indeed representative of early America:

“Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?

I could write a long screed about the history of sodomy laws (hi, Mom!) and why they are a bad argument against the gays, but Chuck Norris has more to say:

While I’m not, of course, espousing such treatment, I do believe that we equally and adamantly should oppose such aberrant sexual behavior from being condoned or commemorated in our public schools…

I could discuss the Day of Silence, and how it doesn’t do much of anything, but my friend Edmund has something to add:

“To represent a man as immoral by his religion, perfidious by his principles, a murderer on point of conscience, an enemy from piety to the foundations of all social intercourse, and then to tell us that we are to offer no violence to such a person under favor, appears to me rather an additional insult and mockery than any sort of corrective to the injury we do our neighbor by the character we give him.”

If Chuck Norris thinks there’s something admirable in Jefferson’s proposal, why doesn’t he espouse it or something like it? Well, because it’s horrible, and if people recognize that such views like that lead to such abhorrent notions, they might abandon them. As well they should.

Following conclusions to their logical consequences: it’s what’s for breakfast.