Don Gifford is a former Lakeland city and Polk county commissioner. He’s a well-known contractor and self-professed Christian. And he posted this on Facebook on Tuesday.
“Islam is a cancer on humanity that, left unchecked, will kill it’s host.” [CQ spelling]
He received approving likes from a former Lakeland police chief, a current employee with the Polk County Property Appraiser, and a woman who once thanked me for treating Sue Eberle with kindness in the face of a figurative mob.
Some other person left this comment:
“Ever notice how quickly cancer is killed with radiation?”
Don said nothing, of course. He went on to make a joke about Thanksgiving after laying into Obama for the 800th time.
I hope, I really do, this is just a case of social media’s grisly ability to warp souls through the absence of any type of personal consequences for viciousness. I hope this is all just genocidal play acting. But I don’t know that I’d bet on it. If there’s ever been a more potent tool for stripping away a person’s humanity than Facebook, I don’t know it. Its ability to focus our worst instincts in dreadfully crushing ways is far outstripping its usefulness as a communication tool. I say that as someone who regrettably needs it as a vehicle for sharing what I write.
Bruce Anderson and I have had nice discussion about discourse on campus and what it means to commit to the values of free speech and exchange of ideas. Here’s a pretty good object lesson of why I think it’s rather absurd to obsess over 20-years-olds experimenting with power they will lose at 22. This where all the free speech bullshit gets real. I do not call on the state to scrutinize Don Gifford for his genocidal sympathies, although it’s been known to do that around here for atheists or criminal justice reformers. I dearly wish Gifford would shut up. But I won’t try to shut him up.
Instead, I’ll never exchange a word with him again that isn’t face-to-face — human to human. I’ll try to remind him how he’s embraced monstrousness and help our community recognize him as one of the openly declared monsters walking among it. He’ll have to decide if a cancer-lover — or whatever he would call me — is as much worth his violence as anyone who attends a mosque.
I would like to tell him that I do not want or need his protection from the religious beliefs of my neighbors. And I hope that if he or anyone else actually acts on their fantasies that I have the courage to stand between them and their prey. I hope much more that we don’t have to find out.
The Judeo-Christian nations of the planet killed through privation, war, and murder roughly 100,000,000 of their fellow Christian men, women, and children between 1914 and 1945. In the process, the Judeo-Christian nations of the planet built and used a machine capable of destroying God’s creation. That’s within living memory. And this Christian death machine, used only by Christians until now, still haunts our nightmares. I know, in the United States of America, that I am much more likely to be murdered by a Christian, whether in a movie theater or in a street, than any other religion.
None of this matters to me.
Religion, like all human forces, exists only in the actions of humans. Thus, I would not condemn my many, many Christian friends because they have the misfortune to share a religion with Don Gifford.
It is not clear to me where Don Gifford acquired the moral standing to describe anything or anyone as a cancer — much less a five-letter word defined individually by more than a billion people. But I would like the people who know me to know that I reject that moral standing in every conceivable way.
