The problem is that the guy isn’t actually creating a hostile environment by posting all this stuff anonymously (or what he THINKS is anonymously, anyway). The hostile environment will only come in to play when somebody publicly joins the dots between the online persona and Real Life Him.
I don’t even know if you CAN oust somebody from public office just on the grounds of being a raging asshole. If you can’t, it seems like the very definition of a bad idea to stir up this can of worms at a point when nobody can do anything about it.
It still seems easy to fake the postings. If he makes real posts using that avatar, then it would be easy for the imitator to just copy the avatar. That, plus the “portions of his real name,” seem designed to make it seem obvious who’s posting. You said you’ve talked to him before. Maybe the first thing you should do is ask him directly if he made the posts.
my vote is that it’s just politics. if there is some legal means to get your neighborhood president booted out then his opponent is free to pursue this and is free to solicit your support. And you can take whichever side you want (or no side at all), just because the opponent is justified doesn’t mean you have to go along with him.
I do think it is fair to take issue with what this guy is posting online, since he is a representative of the community. If this news circulates in your area (and why wouldn’t it?) then you may very well loose a house-hunter or two because someone heard that the folks in Historic Village are all racist assholes. OTOH, where do you draw the line? Are you going to comb through the internet wanderings of everyone who joins a committee or something? And there does seem to be an obvious middle step here, which is write the guy a letter asking him to resign and then see what he comes back with.
The one part that does strike me as dishonest is questioning his mental stability and accusing him of being prone to violence. If the opponent had just left it with “He’s an embarrassment and should resign” then I would say that tactic is opportunistic but not necessarily dishonest.
Certainly the courts might overturn rulings by this guy, but only if somebody ponies up the money for a lawyer. Maybe a local ACLU would step in, OTOH, maybe not and people would have to start raising money for a legal fund.
And this guy’s not out there passing laws that can be overturned along with most of the problems caused by the law. He’s probably something more along the lines of a zoning commissioner, who votes the way he does on various issues regardless of laws and policies that encourage fairness and blahblahblah. So, I don’t think you can sue HIM, and there may not be an unfair law or policy to go after. Instead, you’re relegated to suing, basically, one decision decision at a time. That’s not sustainable.
So if a situation like this arose, I think you would have to attack it like southern blacks did. Protests, buycotts, demonstrations, etc. Basically, things that are so embarrassing and humiliating to the community that they ultimately do the right thing and get rid of the guy in next election cycle.
It would be an interesting process to watch – from a distance. I wouln’t want to be on the front lines, though.
Oh, bullshit. Being a member of an oppressed group, and defending the rights of that group, are not in any way morally equivalent to having expressed opinions that are oppressive of that group. I’m amazed you would even attempt such a comparison, and it insults me.
I don’t agree with you. This is all relative. Being immoral, and voting imorally, are not suffient grounds to forcibly remove someone from office. Somewhere there are other people, with a moral code (if you can call it that – which is a discussion for another thread) that you find repellant, who would be doing the same to you if you had been elected.
IMO, virtually every Republican in Congress would be out of office if morality were the criteria. But it doesn’t work that way, and it shouldn’t.
We’re having several different discussions here. Of course if I were in elected office, people who had a problem with my homosexuality might well be trying to get me defeated in the next election. Everyone who disapproves of a politician is liable to try to get that politician defeated.
The question was whether the politician being a racist, homophobic fuck was a good reason to try to get him defeated, and whether the postings in which he espoused racist, homophobic ideas ought to be circulated to that end.
I think (and the constitution and human rights code of my country think) that racism and homophobia are not welcome, and as a result I think that politicians who espouse such ideas ought to have their views broadly exposed, with a view to defeating them.
I also strenuously disagree, and take great offence at the idea, that defending queer people and reviling them are morally equivalent. They aren’t, and there is nothing hypocritical in thinking that people ought to defeat a politician because he is homophobic and not to defeat another politician because she is queer or defends queer people.
You are correct, and that is my fault. I was conflating the OP with my own hypothetical upthread. For that I apologize.
I was objecting to using non-electoral means to removing a bigot from office. I certainly agree that bigoted public proclamations by candidates are fair game as ammunition for trying to them at the ballot box.
Well, Christ on a crutch, be insulted then! You sound like the serf in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail: “Help, help! I’m being oppressed!” Why does your status as self-proclaimed oppressed person grant you more rights than the rest of us?
You may not like it, but the reality is that IF you supported removing an official from office based solely on what they believed and spoke about, you damn certainly could look forward to having that sword turned on you and yours eventually. There’s no “moral equivalency” about it, because morality doesn’t enter into it: It’s freedom of speech, and it belongs to all of us. It’s the reality of equality in a world where your status as Oppressed One doesn’t mean you stand above the rest of us, or are entitled to better treatment.
People who take offense when clearly none was intended piss me off.
That was NOT the question. The question was whether it was a good enough reason to remove him from office, not to defeat him in the next election. And, again, the only person injecting morality into the discussion is YOU.
I would say that yes, you’re right not to jump on teh bandwagon of recall, but I think that should be seen as a separate issue from circulating the damning materials for political advantage. Bigotry should preclude you from public office, but the mechanism for that **has **to be that people don’t want vote for politicians they know are bigots. Any other mechanism has demonstrable Undesirable Implications. But this does mean that voters need access to their politicians’ public statements, online or otherwise.