No it’s not. The analogy would only work if Dahmer did that in public and no one bothered to stop him. That’s what the OP is decrying: the fact that this guy is racist in public, and other people, who all know he is racist, are not doing anything about it. They are, in effect, condoning his racism.
Furthermore, the OP was under a probably false assumption that this high quality sticker meant that it was mass produced. This would mean that a lot of people had these stickers on their car, and few enough were doing something about it that it was still profitable to sell them. This raises the problem from just being the people who have contact with this one asshole to people all over the country. Sure, you have some people that would be too afraid to do anything about it, but surely in a large enough sample size, there’d be a large campaign dealing with it.
Granted, what you can do about a cannibalistic murderer is different from what you can do about a racist person. They aren’t the same, and the correct response is different. But both are undesirable, and both are something you would expect a decent person to do something about. You would not expect them to give tacit approval by remaining silent.
My jaw is literally dropping at the acceptance of casual racism in this thread. I had no idea this was normal.
Racism is not a neutral political position. Racism hurts. It hurts people, and it hurts society. Imagine the people who see these stickers- the elementary school kid who is struggling to fit in, the valedictorian who is about to set off to college for the first time, the mother nursing dreams for her children, the old man reflecting on a lifetime…bullshit like this hurts them. And it hurts all of us by, in ways subtle and overt, hinders people from their quest to reach their full human potential. It creates inefficiencies in the market of dreams. It brings us all down.
In any case, can you imagine the outrage people would have about a sticker saying “California for the Raza! Keep the gringos out of office!” or “Honk if you hate honkeys!.”
Why are we horrified by references to “nigger” and through out terms like “redneck”?
How less insulting is “redneck”, 10, 25, 50%? Ia there a numerical value on this sort of thing?
I find some of the comments in this thread rather bizzarre. Someone can use their free speech to communicate “hate speech”, but somehow I’m “abusing” my right of free speech to explain to the owner of the property and business why I’m choosing not to patronize their establishment?
I’ve mentioned this before on the boards, but I had a similar train of thought as the OP with the following bumper sticker (seen somewhere in central Illinois): “If we knew it’d be this much trouble, we’d have picked the damned cotton ourselves.”
You’re not getting it. We don’t tolerate racism. We never claimed to tolerate racism. We have no principle that says we need to tolerate racism. We hate racism.
A racist claiming that we should tolerate his views is a fool. More of a fool, because being a racist already made him a fool. He’s like an idiot who says, “You tolerate that other guy being a Dallas Cowboys fan. So you have to tolerate me being a pedophile.”
No, we don’t. There are some things, like what sports teams you like, where people are expected to tolerate different opinions. But there are other things, like pedophilia, that are wrong and nobody has to tolerate them. Racism is wrong and we don’t have to tolerate it.
Was this to me? No, I think it’s wrong to call somebody a nigger under any circumstances. I was addressing the question of whether it is right to respond with violence.
There is, by definition, no such thing as a neutral political position.
I agree. Racism is hateful, corrosive to its practitioners, its targets, and society as a whole.
Nevertheless, the peaceful expression of hateful ideas is rightly protected in this society, because the alternative is worse still.
That doesn’t mean accepting those ideas. No, challenge them, by all means! But meet them with better ideas, not with vigilantism.