Celebrating death

During my school years, I ran into a lot of problems. Among them was that my teachers were consistently anti-educational, intolerant, and abusive. For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on intolerance.

My teachers were completely hostile to any deviation from their narrow and rigid mold. I have long felt that my teachers would celebrate if I died because I refused to conform to their precious mold. What did we see after the murder of Charlie Kirk? Teachers were among the most likely to celebrate his murder.

Some conservatives went too far on this issue. We should not attack teachers for simply acknowledging that they didn't like Kirk. That said, there have to be limits. People who celebrate the murder of someone who thinks differently than they do should not be in a position of influence over the mental development of future generations.

I do not believe in criminalizing the behavior of these teachers, but I am open to consequences. The standards usually applied to the profession insist that teachers can't be punished for speech unless it impacts their jobs. Any reasonable parent would not want their children's minds molded by people who feel that thinking differently is justification for murder. I am perfectly fine with the more extreme dialog resulting in removal from the teaching profession.

None of this was surprising. We are talking about what could very well be the world's most intolerant profession. What was surprising was that the political party trying to criminalize arbitrarily defined hate speech suddenly claimed to be the defenders of free speech.

Before I go any further, I need to clarify something. Although I tend to support Republicans over Democrats, that's because I have bigger issues with the Democrats. A lot of people are entrenched in the political binary that everyone is either a mindless liberal conformist or a mindless conservative conformist. Despite my venting against Democrats, I am definitely not a Republican.

One of my biggest issues with Donald Trump is that he is bringing what I hate about the Democratic party to the Republican party. As a non-conformist, I'm certainly open to changes within the Republican party. Becoming more like the Democrats, however, is not a change that I can personally support. This was one of the reasons that I outright refused to vote for Trump.

When Robert Mueller died, Trump post about being glad he died. Suddenly, Republicans defended this behavior as free speech and Democrats called him out for his words. The Democrats were also aggressive in calling out the hypocrisy of Republicans defending speech that they previously criticized. The same party that is comparing Mueller to Kirk views one as free speech and the other as crossing a line. They are defending their hypocrisy by pointing out the hypocrisy of others.

What qualifies as freedom of speech should come down to the speech, not the partisanship. Should people be able to publicly celebrate the deaths of people they disagree with? Personally, I am opposed to criminalization, but they shouldn't be sheltered from consequences. Although I don't want anyone to go to jail for their words, teachers celebrating the murder of Kirk and Trump celebrating the death of Mueller deserve to be ridiculed for what they have said. Actually, they should probably be more than just ridiculed.