Because they might shoot you, that’s why.
Yesterday, a bigot murdered two Methodists and a Catholic because he thought they were Jews. In August 2012 a bigot shot ten Sikhs, killing six and wounding four, because he thought they were Muslims. On Christmas Eve of 1985, a bigot murdered the four members of Seattle’s Charles Goldmark family because he thought they were Jews and Communists. They were neither. Charles Manson was a bigot who murdered whites to provoke a race war against blacks.
You can be as white as an Easter Lily and get killed by a bigot anyway, either because he thinks like Manson, or assumes you’re something else he doesn’t like — Irish, Italian, Polish, Estonian, Ukrainian, or whatever.
I won’t even try to explain the pathology of bigotry. That’s a job for researchers and academics. Bigots are morons. That’s all you or I need to know about them.
I’m not referring to IQ. Being intelligent isn’t the same as being smart. The world is full of stupid geniuses, if you know what I mean. It’s perfectly possible for a person with a high IQ to become a bigot. No doubt some of them are. But all bigots are morons, regardless of what their IQs are. Bigotry is inherently stupid, and setting aside whatever native intelligence you were born with is a necessary prerequisite to becoming a bigot. You can’t be a bigot and be smart at the same time, anymore than you can be white and be black at the same time. Bigotry and smarts are fundamentally incompatible.
I don’t have to explain that, do I? It should be self-evident.
This is America. Freedom of speech and association are constitutional rights. It’s not a crime to hate other people because of their skin color, religion, language, or culture. It’s not unlawful, per se, to join a KKK klavern, or shave your head and wear Doc Marten boots, or spew bigoted nonsense. We don’t have status crimes in our country, which means we don’t jail people for being morons. We wait until they hurt someone before locking them up. That’s just the way it is.
Oh, we have involuntary commitment, and all that; but, you know, bigotry isn’t a mental illness either. At least, I don’t believe it is, not in the legal sense that defines mental incompetence as inability to distinguish right from wrong. I think bigots know what they’re doing and should be held responsible for it. They may be ninety-five percent mentally ill, and probably a lot of them are, but it was the other five percent that shot those people yesterday. The stupid five percent that chose to be a bigot and couldn’t tell the difference between Jews, Methodists, and Catholics. The ninety-five percent of that guy’s brain that’s mentally ill is irrelevant, because it’s the moron part of his brain that told him to shoot those people because anyone visiting a Jewish facility must be a Jew. Mental illness doesn’t make a person stupid enough to come up with an idiotic conclusion like that. It takes a moron.
It’s too bad we can’t amend the Constitution so we could preemptively lock up bigots, because without exception bigots are morons, and morons are a menace to society. I don’t know what to do about these people. I have no suggestions. Stay the hell out of their way, I guess. I can’t think of anything else to do
. But if you don’t see them coming, there’s not much you can do. Some stranger could walk up behind you, level a shotgun at you, and blow you away simply because he feels like it. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Rabbits have had this problem for centuries.