The Wages of Hate Speech

This past weekend a gunman walked into a Knoxville, TN church in order to "kill liberals "who are ruining the country," court records show." The knoxnews.com web site is reporting that the gunman, Jim David Adkisson, was an apparent fan of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and other right-wing hate mongers.

Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

Adkisson told Still that "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."

This attack by Adkisson is a direct result of the hate speech that is spewed on a daily basis from the right-wing noise machine.

Every time Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, Malkin, etc bad-mouth Liberals or Democrats and use eliminationist rhetoric unbalanced nut-jobs like Adkisson get the ideas in their heads that it's OK to, at the minimum, do physical violence to the nearest Liberal they can find, or at the worst, try to kill them. The right-wing noise machine and everyone who willingly participates in it is directly responsible for what happened in that Knoxville church just as surely as Mr. Adkisson is. They said the words. They goaded him on. They pushed him over the edge.

And then he killed people.

Wake up, America. Support for hate breeds more hate. And as the bumper sticker says "hate is not a family value."