Washington Times headline, June 15, 2106: “Pastor who praised Orlando shooting: ‘In America, you’re no longer allowed to have an opinion’ ”
This is rich. Roger Jimenez, the Baptist preacher in Sacramento who said, about the Orlando massacre in a gay nightclub, “that the tragedy is that more of them didn’t die,” now complains about backlash to his statement, saying, “in America, you’re no longer allowed to have an opinion. In America, you’re no longer allowed to say anything that doesn’t follow what mainstream media tells you what you’re allowed to say.”
Funny how this opinion he supposedly isn’t allowed to have and supposedly isn’t allowed to say has been seen and heard in mainstream media outlets across the political spectrum from the Washington Post to ABC News to the Washington Times to CBS News to the Daily Mail to the L.A. Times to FOX News to the Sacramento Bee to, well, you get the picture. For someone who supposedly isn’t allowed to have an opinion, his certainly seems to be turning up all over the place.
So, what he really means is, he thinks that in America he’s supposed to be able to have his opinion, and a platform to express it — and both of those things clearly seem to be present — but anyone who disagrees with him is not supposed to be able to have an opinion about his opinions, and is not supposed to be able to speak out against his opinions. He seems to believe that freedom of speech means only his freedom of speech to call for the government to execute me but not my freedom of speech to say that he’s a dangerous, sociopathic zealot, and he seems to believe that freedom of speech means freedom from the consequences of his speech.
By both of these things, he shows himself to be utterly ignorant of the U.S. Constitution. That’s not surprising, obviously, given that one of his other opinions — the ones he’s allegedly not allowed to hold, yet have turned up on media around the country — is that the U.S. government should be executing gay people, because his holy book says so. There’s an awful lot of ignorance about and contempt for the Constitution packed into that opinion.
That’s my opinion. And, as far as I’m concerned — and as far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned — Jimenez has the right to disagree with me.