A disgusting story out of Minnesota: A couple in Rochester is hanging Barack Obama's empty chair in effigy outside there home, and claiming that the not-so-subtle lynching reenactment isn't racist.
The couple got the idea, of course, from Clint Eastwood's speech at the GOP convention, in which he angrily addressed an imaginary Barack Obama sitting in an empty chair he had on stage. The display is really only one half step away from suspending an actual Obama effigy from a hangman's noose. To call this anything other than wildly offensive, inappropriate and racist is completely ignorant.
Here's more, from the Rochester Post-Bulletin:
A southwest Rochester woman said she doesn’t see any problem with a politically oriented display in her yard in which a chair is suspended from a tree by a noose, with a bayonet and rifle stuck in the side of the chair — a reference to President Obama.
“It’s been there for a month,” said Laura Mulholland on Tuesday when asked about the display outside her house at 3005 40th St. S.W. "I'm not sure why everyone is up in arms about it."
Mulholland said she and her husband, Kevin Mulholland, got the idea for displaying an empty chair after watching actor Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention, where he had an imaginary conversation with Obama.
Mulholland, 46, said she saw photos of empty chairs on the conservative political blog Power Line, as well as on Facebook and FoxNews.com. The idea for the bayonet came from Obama's comment about "horses and bayonets" in the third debate with his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Mulholland said she doesn’t consider the display a form of hate speech and doesn’t hold animosity toward blacks. She said the display isn’t meant as a direct threat to Obama.
Perhaps it's not a threat, but it certainly has the impact of a hate-motivated display, said W.C. Jordan, president of the Rochester branch of the NAACP as well as the Minnesota/Dakota Area State Conference president. He heard about it through the city's hate-crime prevention task force.
"It's pretty much gone viral," Jordan said of the Mulhollands' display, and he's heard about it from people outside the state.
"There's free speech," he said, "but the message that it sends is a very negative message from this community. It sends a message that people of color are not welcome in this state, and it paints a very negative picture of welcoming people to this state."
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