Faced by a very clear threat of impending destruction, what did the Nazis do?
They stepped up the rate and scale of operations at their genocidal death camps.
During the recent Maryland Assembly legislative session, among other things, bills were signed into law that will take effect in October 2009. These bills included SB 151 and HB 560.
HB 560 (click for PDF):
Expanding the scope of prohibitions against committing specified crimes against specified persons, damaging property of specified persons, burning specified objects, and damaging specified buildings to include disability; prohibiting the attempt to commit a crime against a specified person because of the race, color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, disability, or national origin of that person; etc.
SB 151 (click for PDF):
Including homelessness and a person's gender within the scope of prohibitions against committing specified crimes against specified persons, damaging property of specified persons, and damaging specified buildings with which specified persons or groups have contacts or associations; prohibiting the attempt to commit a crime against a specified person because of the race, color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender, or national origin of that person, or because the person is homeless; defining "homeless"; etc.
In recent weeks I have detailed a lot of seemingly unrelated threads of weirdness in Aspen Hill and nearby communities.
In one thread I questioned the wisdom -- not to mention the sanity -- of the way we deal with homelessness, addiction, and mental health-care here in Montgomery. This necessarily also covers the immense dissatisfaction of many persons other than myself, and I offer direct quotes from outraged neighborhood activists opposing the current site of the addiction/homelessness/mental health-care "headquarter" at 751 Twinbrook Parkway, which not incidentally and not without irony is also the headquarters of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.
I thought I'd point out the irony in a nice heavy-handed way, some people need that.
In another thread, I got a bit obsessive on the subject of the Sex Gang Children of the Midtown Alcoholics Anonymous "13th Step" program. What can I say, once again my irony has to be announced to people who -- probably due to their medications -- can't quite get it: It's more than a bit hypocritical when damaged parents on drugs send their damaged children on drugs through court actions into places where people damaged by drugs sexually prey on damaged children, and it all gets passed off as "therapy". Furthermore, this is now multigenerational and so entrenched in some places as to amount to "tradition".
Through all of these threads, I recurrently ask the question "how did we, as a society, ever get to be so fucking crazy?"
That's a question that the Germans are still asking themselves, more than half a century later. They're not so crazy now and they take great pains that what happened before will not happen again.
But in the final months and weeks when it became evident that the Allies were going to put a well-deserved end to the monstrosities of the Third Reich, back when the Germans as a society were batshit insane but extremely orderly and highly-technologized about it, when it looked like their toys and victims were about to be taken away from them, the Germans increased their madness by increasing the rate at which they murdered in hate-crime.
And now, in the final days before "I thought he was homeless" or "I thought he was mental" are forever removed as defenses to charges of assault -- and in fact become admissions of hatred as motivation to violent crime and effectively double the penalties -- the haters are ramping up their level of organization and hatred, and getting technologized about it, as well.
Definitely more to come!
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