Stop. Just, stop.

There's a disturbing trend in our country, one that thankfully exposes much hypocrisy, but also shamefully highlights at least as much ignorance and bigotry. It's the increasingly more common fact that so many American citizens profess to revere and stand by the U.S. Constitution, while using it as so much toilet paper whenever it clearly dictates against personal preference, or when it's interpreted by the highest court in the land, The Supreme Court of the U.S., to say something that gets one's panties in a sweaty bunch.


  I'm going to spare you an in-depth analysis of the myriad topics and rulings that have, over the last several months, resulted in this post. Instead, I'm just going to make some points, as briefly as my admittedly excessive verbosity will allow, and then step away from the keyboard:


  1) If you think a state government should fly, or if you choose to fly, a flag that has come to represent a cadre of states that openly and violently committed treason in order to maintain the status quo regarding the ownership of and commerce in human beings utilized to perform uncompensated labor under dire conditions of imprisonment and torture, you love neither the Constitution nor the United States of America.
  2) If you feel that your religious beliefs should be used as any sort of template for public education, civil rights laws, or election funding, you are operating under a gross misinterpretation of at least a very crucial part of the U.S. Constitution.
  3) If you believe that "freedom of speech" means that you are permitted to say anything you damned well please, no matter the lack of veracity or irrationality of said speech, and that having done so, no private person or business can do anything to hold you accountable, via restriction of interaction or criticism, for what you've said, then once again, there's an important part of the Constitution you simply do not grasp, and you'd be well served to consult someone who does understand so that they can explain it to you, thereby having yourself set at least somewhat straighter.


  So please, if only for as long as this post sticks in your memory, stop with the fallacious cries of censorship, restriction of rights, reverse-racism, persecution, or whatever other imagined crimes your pathetic little martyr complex has you feeling victim to at the moment. You're wrong, and you're whining more than an adult should.