No Regrets

Have you come here for forgiveness,

Have you come to raise the dead?

Have you come here to play Jesus

To the lepers in your head?

--U2, "One"

I kind of backed off from the whole Sherri Goforth story after Tuesday night.  I had a lot more to say, but this story picked a terribly inconvenient week to break, with me finishing up Summer Job #1 and coming home every night to a house full of boxes to unpack (although we're totally done upstairs now!).

But ultimately, I have no regrets over what happened.  And I'm sorry if that makes me self-righteous or someone who yelled "monster" in order to hand out torches and pitchforks.

No one could have possibly anticipated how fast that story would blow up--how quickly it would go from being a few bloggers talking about it in Tennessee to international news.  I made my little timeline of what happened on Monday night because I still couldn't believe it then.

Now, I realize I may have contributed to it spiraling out of control in some way by posting it on Daily Kos.  But I did that thinking maybe a few of my friends over there would read it and that would be the end of it, having no idea that within twenty minutes it would end up as the top post on the front page.  Diaries being promoted like that happens very rarely, and usually not to people like me who don't post over there all that much anyway.  But I don't regret that either; it was a story that obviously struck a nerve with quite a few people.

When Obama pointed out during the campaign that he didn't "look like all those other Presidents," was he not accused of "playing the race card"?  Is it not still "the race card" when played by someone else?

I wasn't trying to "make myself feel better" or hold up "the superiority of my beliefs."  My goal was simply to get the word out and to show exactly what those of us in red states are dealing with right now.  I know we generally don't like to "air our dirty laundry" in the South, but sometimes the light of the day is the best disinfectant.

I didn't call on her to be fired then.  Honestly, whether she keeps her job or not is now beside the point.  But it does make me incredibly sad to know that the person who leaked the original email to Newscoma is probably in greater danger of losing his/her job should his/her identity ever come out than Goforth ever was.  And why exactly was what the 20-year old intern did worse than what Goforth did?

I could ask why there's such a double standard, why we're asked to forgive the moral failings of conservatives when they would never extend such forgiveness to any of us in such a situation.  But that question has been asked so many times by so many people that I know there's no good answer.

It would be nice if we really could all forgive, move on, and use this as a teachable moment.  And this is, ultimately, so much bigger than one staffer.  But all she and Senator Black had to do when confronted with the wrongdoing was apologize.  Instead, all we got were multiple apologies for sending the email "to the wrong list."  If that was an inaccurate report of what was said, we haven't yet heard anything to the contrary.  And it begs the question that has remained in my head since then--what is the "right list"?

Again, if this were just a one-time thing, I could easily see the uproar as an overreaction.  If it hadn't come from the same people who brought us "Hey Harold, call me", "Barack Hussein Obama the secret Muslim", the Nathan Vaughn blackbird mailer, and "Barack the Magic Negro", then yes, the resulting uproar would have been an overreaction to one simple lapse in judgment.  But this was not what happened here.  This was someone thinking they wouldn't get caught.

You can't have a teaching moment or a conversation about a problem with those who refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem in the first place.

It doesn't matter to me whether or not she keeps her job.  She probably won't get fired, so all I can do is hope that she now understands why it was wrong.  But if she does get fired for doing something like this on a state email on the state's dime, then no, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

If I made any mistakes along the way, it was assuming that Kleinheider had ulterior motives for not covering the story earlier.  While I still disagree with his reasoning, I assumed something I didn't understand and I fully admit that I was wrong to do so (There.  Was that so hard?).

So, fellow bloggers, I'm sorry if that makes me self-righteous or part of a torch-and-pitchfork mob.  But I'm not going to be made to feel guilty for calling attention to something that unquestionably needed attention.  I'm Jewish, I'm made to feel guilty over everything else I do.