You may be shocked by the following account of dastardly hate crimes.
You may be horrified.
You may cry aloud “Merciful heavens! Is there no limit to the unmitigated perfidy!”
Sweet Jesus give me strength, I can barely recount these abhorrent acts. Brace yourself for a disgustingly graphic description of assaults sure to leave even strong men prostrate, tearing their hair in horror at the wanton, inhuman nature of the merciless transgressions.
I only dare do this after the fold, so that squeamish readers can be forewarned and hie themselves off to less intense news elsewhere.
Seven Amish Men Charged with Hate Crimes for Beard Cutting
The men […] forcibly restrained multiple Amish men and cut their beards and hair with scissors and battery powered clippers …
Yeah.
I just love the story for so many reasons. The main culprit of the tale is named Mullet, which tickles my sense of humor at its East Texas roots. The fact that there are multiple Mullets — Samuel Mullet, Johnny Mullet, Lester Mullet, Daniel Mullet — only makes the image sweeter.
Mullet, accompanied by his sons, sons-in-law, and nephews, hired a driver to take them and their horse-drawn buggy to the home of one of the bishops that ruled against him. They knocked on the door and told the man they wished to speak with him, according to the complaint, and then assaulted the man and his son, known as Victims 1 and 2. They then pulled and cut their beard hair. They took pictures of the results and took the pictures with them, the document says.
Juxtapose the described crime against, oh, real-world images of murder or women drowning their kids in the bathtub, and it just seems so strangely genteel. If this is what the Amish do when they rise to HATE CRIMES, I’d love to have them as neighbors.
Any atheist worth his salt would have to point out the comically religious element of the thing, and I do. But I still have a hard time seeing the whole thing as serious enough to warrant federal prosecution. There’s something, I don’t know, frivolous, in seeing these men in federal court. To me — bearded to the death! — the whole thing still smacks of streakers, or 50s-era campus panty raids.
Am I wrong?