Over the weekend Florida teen Christopher Holder got himself arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for doing nothing more than walking down the street and loudly spitting out obscenity-laced verses from a Lil’ Boosie song.
A woman walking nearby with her five-year-old son caught his performance and called the cops. Holder pled guilty on Monday and got six months probation. When Fox News blowhard John Gibson got word of this he dedicated yesterday’s “My Word” segment to praising the cops and calling for similar arrests of profane rappers.
Gibson opened his rant with the ignorant statement “I have argued that African-American leaders need to do something about rap music for some time now…” because apparently he believes rap is just a black thing. He goes on to argue that arresting Holder was the right thing to do and this case should be an example.
In the name of protecting those, oh so innocent children from the dangers of bad words, Gibson’s idea is to arrest the people who recorded the songs and then go after people playing rap music loudly from their cars because those awful sounds might be heard by a child in a nearby car.
Now Gibson isn’t the first to voice this sort of thought, and he probably wont be the last. But really, the entire argument he’s making is ridiculous. Holder isn’t an example; he’s a Florida trailer park kid who fell victim to a rude woman and an overzealous cop.
Free speech and other legal issues aside, Gibson’s notion here would lead to the always slippery slope of where to draw the line on censorship and who gets to do the drawing. In his world, every problem or annoyance is cause for legal action.
Personally, I take great offense to much of what Gibson and his Fox cohorts produce as “news” but I’m not out here saying they should be arrested for offending my sensibilities. If rappers should go to jail for saying a few “bad” words, then the entire Fox News crew should go for spreading their own brand of offensive hate, divisiveness, negative rumor and misinformation.
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