Such a shame that stupid, frightened and probably inbred white dudes can’t grasp the irony of, in an attempt to beat up an illegal immigrant, instead, beating up a boy who has more right to be on this continent, and indeed, in this country that their white European-descended arses.
(“Liberated” from CNN) — A jury awarded $2.5 million in damages on Friday to a Kentucky teenager who was severely beaten by members of a Ku Klux Klan group because they mistakenly thought he was an illegal Latino immigrant, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.
The jury found that the Imperial Klans of America and its founder wrongfully targeted 16-year-old Jordan Gruver, an American citizen of Panamanian and Native-American descent.
The verdict included $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages against “Imperial Wizard” Ron Edwards.
The law center said before the verdict that a large damage award could break the Klan group, allowing the teen and the law center to seize the group’s assets, including its headquarters, a 15-acre compound in Dawson Springs, Kentucky.
“We look forward to collecting every dime that we can for our client and to putting the Imperial Klans of America out of business,” said SPLC founder and chief trial attorney Morris Dees, who tried the case.
Gruver, backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed the personal injury lawsuit last year seeking up to $6 million in damages from the Imperial Klans of America and two of its leaders — Edwards and “Grant Titan” Jarred R. Hensley.
An all-white jury of seven men and seven women deliberated for five hours after three days of testimony. The suit alleged that Edwards, Hensley, and the Imperial Klans of America as a whole incited its members to use violence against minorities.
“The people of Meade County, Kentucky, have spoken loudly and clearly. And what they’ve said is that ethnic violence has no place in our society, that those who promote hate and violence will be held accountable and made to pay a steep price,” Dees said.
According to testimony, three members of the Klan group confronted Gruver in July 2006 during a recruiting mission at the Meade County Fair in Brandenberg, Kentucky. They taunted him with ethnic slurs — inaccurate ones — spat on him and doused him with alcohol .Two of the men, including Hensley, knocked Gruver to the ground and repeatedly struck and kicked him.
“All I could see was a bunch of feet,” Gruver, now 19, told the jury. “As they were kicking me, I prayed to myself. I said, ‘God, just please let me go. Please let me make it home.’ ”
When the blows stopped, Gruver had a broken jaw, broken left forearm, two cracked ribs and cuts and bruises.
He testified that he has suffered permanent nerve damage and psychological trauma. He doesn’t leave his house and rarely sleeps more than two hours at a time because he has nightmares, CNN affiliate WLKY reported.
Among the evidence the jury saw was a pair of red-laced, steel-toed boots. A police witness testified that Hensley wore the boots the night he and another Klansman attacked Gruver.
Edwards acknowledged from the witness stand that the boots were the “weapon of choice” for skinheads and that the red laces carried special significance — that “someone should shed blood for their race.”
*Snipped* because I don’t care about the rest of the article.
I didn’t, however, care much for this bit…
On its Web site, the Imperial Klans of America refers to itself as a Christian organization exercising its rights of free speech and assembly under the U.S. Constitution.
The site carries this proviso: “If you are not of the White race, this Web site is not for the likes of YOU!” It then goes on to name the races and ethnicities it “hates,” adding, “This is our God-given right.”
The Web site disavows violence or any kind of criminal activity.
Edwards lives in a trailer on the Klan group’s heavily guarded, gated compound in rural Dawson Springs. The compound is the site of the Klan’s annual white power rally and music festival, know as “Nordic Fest,” according to the suit.
I’m okay with the “Christian organisation” shit because I don’t have a great deal of respect for any religion, so I don’t care. As for exercising their right to free speech, absolutely. Even delusional dumbasses have the right to say anything they want, and I defend their right to say it just as I’d defend my own to call them delusional dumbasses. Nordic Fest, though? I skimmed the article, and I see surnames like Edwards, Kelly and Butler. I see a Gunter, and I’ll give him Nordic, but the rest of them are about as “Nordic” as I am, and knowing/having known probably twenty-five people who genuinely qualify as Nordic (doesn’t get any more Nordic than Sweden, Denmark and Norway) it’s a horrendous insult. I don’t particularly want illegals here any more than these fucking losers do–I did it legally, and goddamnit, they should, too–but the whole “white power” thing is nothing more than fear gone mad, an inability to take responsibility for one’s own failures, and a desperate, pathetic attempt to belong somewhere. There exists no Aryan Nation except as a prison gang, there is no “pure” white race. I have as much (and perhaps more) a problem with immigrants who refuse to assimilate and instead, try to turn their new country into their old one, but when, oh when will this stupid Klan crap just go away?
P.S. Ran into L. late last night/early his morning; he’d crashed during an attempt to watch a film, and I was still up because P. was in Fred Flintstone mode. We had a lovely little chat, and I actually remember what I said (yay), plus he also told me that he not only doesn’t mind my drunk-mail, but actually enjoys reading them. P. was playing Half Life 2 last night (in between BSODs…hehe), and although I should have been catching up on Flickr, I wasn’t in the mood to be “on for the public”. Still, I almost had to sit on my hands to keep from writing a Wall O’ Drunken Text to L. because I don’t have to be in public-mode for him, and…he said he was rather disappointed I hadn’t. Bless his heart. I think what I do wrong with him is try too hard to separate. I’m reasonably good at empathy, as is he, but really have to keep reminding myself, “Other people are not you. They may or may not have the same reaction to something that you would have,” but he and I are enough alike that I don’t think I need to do that so much. It’s habit because I’ve done it so long, but I think I need to back it off for him. I’d also been mistaken about something he said a long time ago–that hanging with friends IRL is vastly superior to anything the virtual world can offer. I took that to mean that because I’m not next door, I am and would be always a sort of “second class citizen”, but that wasn’t what he meant. He didn’t mean the people, he meant the method of communication, since text-only does not offer what are perhaps the most important bits of effective communication…facial expression, body language, tone of voice. He’s right, of course, but I’d taken it as an insult when that was not the way he’d intended it. He said I was just being hypersensitive, but I disagree; no one wants to be told, “You will always have a second-class status, no matter what you say or do,” and certainly not when there is nothing that can be done about it. It isn’t what he meant, but it is what I’d mistakenly understood, and I don’t think that really qualifies as “hypersensitive”. Oh, well…he may have season tickets to my frontal cortex, and it may sometimes seem like I’m talking to the masculine side of my own personality, but that doesn’t mean we’ll always agree, and that’s okay. 🙂
