Well Explained

Lileks:

This story made my eyebrows hoist. A "conservationist, columnist for the Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust” named Robin Page won 2K pounds in a court award for false arrest. It took five years to do so. From the article:

He claims that in order to gain the attention of listeners at the gathering in Frampton-upon-Severn, Glos, he started in a "light-hearted fashion".
His opening remark was: "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."

Naturally, he was arrested for committing a hate crime. It made me think of a Jay Leno remark I heard excerpted on the Hewitt show; Chris Matthews was describing the GOP contenders in terms of the Iraqi political players – these guys are Sunnis, these guys are Shiites, Romney’s the Kurd. Leno responded that "Larry Craig was the guy with the sheep." If you wanted to be offended, you could note that this equated homosexuality with bestiality, and cast Arabs as dispositionally zoophilic. Should he be arrested? Charged with inciting the easily incitable, with equating the newly-minted right to play jiggery-pokery in a lav with an aberrant behavior? If it's abberant, that is. We’re probably ten years away from bestiality japes entering the no-go zone. Within five years they’ll probably remake “Flipper,” and it’ll be a hard R. Critics of the movie, if they’re on the right, will be subjected to the usual eye-rolling, because they can’t possibly be objecting to sex with animals; it’s part-and-parcel of their desire to return to the 50s, when Donna Reed was chained to a stove, deprived of footwear, perpetually pregnant and forced to vote for Ike at knifepoint. Oh, sure, you disapprove of sex-positive dolphin movies. Your kind didn't want the nation to see Elvis from the waist down. Doesn't mean the critics will be comfy with Flipper-gets-busy movies, but they have a dread of making common cause with the trogs. So the movie will be criticized on aesthetic grounds. If nothing else, its poor script and pedestrian direction will be a lost opportunity to advance a controversial topic.