What I find most amusing on these threads is that a contingent of folks can’t seem to recognize that BOTH sides in this can be in the wrong. Even if the bikers are the scum of the earth, they are still entitled to the protection of our laws, because to deny that is to later deny that same protection to the innocent. Obviously no one is familiar with A Man for All Seasons anymore:
Thomas More: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
Nice quote. My wife alerted me to Thomas More many years ago.
It’s frustrating to see how blithely some would deprive citizens of their rights. There is a failure of imagination to not even consider how precedents get set. An unreflecting mind considers the “present emergency” only.
Thomas More?
Are you referring to the same Thomas More that wrote of a communist society where there was no private property and promoted ease of divorce and euthanasia?
“Thomas More: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Apparently that is just what TM did!
‘Sir Thomas was also a man who so abhorred Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation that he burned Lutherans at the stake with great relish. One of More’s motives for hating the Protestant heretics was that they dared to read the New Testament in English rather than Latin, which was against the law in England at the time.’
http://moralcompassblog.com/2013/04/11/thomas-more-inquisitor-torturer-killer-saint/
“With the help of John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, More personally broke into the houses of suspected heretics, arresting them on the spot and sometimes interrogating them in his own home. He imprisoned one man in the porter’s lodge of his house, and had him put in the stocks. He raided the home of a businessman called John Petyt, who was suspected of financing [protestant Bible translator William] Tyndale; Petyt died in the Tower. Six rebellious Oxford students were kept for months in a fish cellar; three of them died in prison. More was now a spiritual detective, a policeman in a hair shirt, engaged in “what would now be called surveillance and entrapment among the leather-sellers, tailors, fishmongers and drapers of London.” Six protesters were burned under More’s chancellorship, and perhaps forty were imprisoned.”
http://moralcompassblog.com/2013/04/11/thomas-more-inquisitor-torturer-killer-saint/