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Sunday, March 19, 2006
Why you can't just ignore them...
People often tell me I should just ignore the likes of Ann Coulter, but I think that's a pretty serious mistake. There's a whole coterie of folks on the right who pretend their whole spiel is an act, just for fun, while they continue to appear on allegedly "serious" news and talk shows. And, unlike the talk of relatively unknown people like, say, Ward Churchill, people hear them. And this is what results:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe" of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.

Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O'Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.

Should people like Ann Coulter be censored for saying that someone should poison Justice Stevens? Of course not. But neither should they be accepted as someone with something to contribute to civil discourse, and to the extent that they are by the GOP, Fox News, and others on the right, they should be held responsible for sponsoring and exposing these views to the public.
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