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Romantic Southie is dead and gone
It's with Wacko Hurley in the grave.
RIP you miserable prick!
Rude
Wacko Hurley was an American veteran. His beliefs may not have coincided with yours, but it's a free country.
Hatred
Hatred was this man's demons. I also fought as well. As a veteran we different, I was a true Christian, he was not.
and
You were a different Christian. The past tense illustrates the hatred you express.
I'm sorry, I'm not an expert
I'm sorry, I'm not an expert on Christianity, bulgingbuick. So how was it this vet [the poster, not Wacko] expressed hatred?
"So how was it this vet expressed hatred?"
He beat the combined black-robed weight of the Massachusetts Judicial System.
With a stick.
Not Wacko. He's famous, after
Not talking about Wacko. He's famous, after all. The vet and BulgingBuick's response who both posted about him right above me:
OK
OK.
Wacko was a racist and sexist who damaged this city
I'm not going to dance on his grave. I'm also not going to pretend that he was better than he is.
Well said
..and the fact that "Mayor" Walsh even acknowledged him shows us how bad Walsh is at judging character.
Can't wait to vote against him again.
"RIP you miserable prick!" Another tolerant liberal.
God Bless you, Mr. Hurley and thank you for your service to your nation and neighborhood, sir. May your courage and 9-0 Supreme Court decision be widely known to future generations. Sometimes when it appears all hope is lost, folks like Governor Maggie Hassan, Congressmen Bill Keating and Steve Lynch follow your example of doing what's right instead of what's politically correct. Requiēscat in pāce.
So, Fish
You know BullDetector personally and his or her political leanings?
Or are you just another information averse, shallow-thinking reactionary neocon?
The latter
The latter.
Reality check
He won't be known to future generations. He'll be a dusty footnote and in 10 years no-one who matters will care who he was, just like Dapper is completely irrelevant and largely unknown to the vast majority of people here in Roslindale now.
BTW, what a dumb argument -tolerance means judging people on their actions, not their race, sex or sexual orientation, not giving carte blanche to the bigots.
Fish is right.
"May your courage and 9-0 Supreme Court decision be widely known to future generations."
It will be. As far as being a dusty footnote, it's settled law that has been cited thousands of times.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/515/557.html
"BTW, what a dumb argument -tolerance means judging people on their actions, not their race, sex or sexual orientation, not giving carte blanche to the bigots."
Actually, tolerance, in a First Amendment sense means precisely that. The protection of all speech is paramount, with certain limited exclusions such as the famous 'fire in a crowded theater' example.
Problem with most bigots is that they are too closed-minded lefties. I'm more centrist. I listen to NPR in the car, but if I suggest watching something on Fox, the leftie heads asplode with 'Faux Not News'. Must not watch.
Actually...
...someone set me straight on the Schenk case and how Holmes used it to justify surpression of wartime dissent.
Quite different.
Um ok
'Most bigots are too closed minded lefties'?
really? I mean if you want to argue that there is a lack of tolerance of opinion on the left, that's a valid point but if you are going to claim that most bigots are lefties, I can't see that as a centrist view point, sorry.
I was referring to what IMO tolerance means, not specifically speaking to the First Amendment rights which I'd categorize as free speech, a related but different thing. For example, the Westboro Church clearly exercises their free speech rights and as a consequence is widely reviled for their actions by people who are more inclusive aka tolerant of different types of people.. I have a hard time buying the argument that the people who despise Westboro are intolerant just as I don't believe that people who despise say, ISIS, are being intolerant or anti-Muslim.
Hypocrisy becomes you
Don't speak ill of the dead? Indeed.
so he's not consistent
sue him
Touche
He actually is consistent: People who share his views are Americans and everybody else is godless scum.
Future generations are
Future generations are already disgusted by bigots like Hurley who went out of their way to deny equal rights to others. Homophobes are dying off quickly and young people are benefiting from their absence.
Sorry for his family's loss
But, anyway .. who's up for a parade?
It will be a gay ole time.
It will be a gay ole time.
hey!
OMG a big, rainbow balloons&chaps old school gay parade down Broadway might be the thing that *would* make me dance on Wacko's grave, my earlier post above regardless.
It sad that he lived long
It sad that he lived long enough to see the parade he loved so much co-oped and destroyed.
Irony
Most Irish people I talk to (Real ones. From from Ireland) feel that it was Hurley and his ilk that co-opted and destroyed a very welcoming and inclusionary Irish tradition.
wacko
Wacko was a good man. He did alot behind the scenes that no one knew about. He was always the first one to open up at St.Monicas at Thanksgiving and Xmas to hand out turkeys to the disadvantaged. He helped organize that event too when he was healthy. He deeply cared for the well being of his community and you cant say that about 98% of Americans today. Especially some of the young professionals moving into southie today that could care less about their neighbor a d their time there is just a subway stop until they move on to thier nect place. At the end of the day the Supreme Court thought he was right too. I cant think of another 9-0 decision
He was right.
As far as other 9-0 decisions, let me introduce you to Constitutional scholar and not a full professor, President Barack H. Obama, head of an administration that has been handed many Supreme Court defeats, at least thirteen of them by a 9-0 decision.
Supreme Court Justices are always right...
except for when they are wrong: Scott v. Sandford.
As for the decision concerning the parade the Supreme Court implied that the parade organizers, as a private organization, had the right to discriminate againts any group they disagree with. Yet the same court has yet to invalidate laws that prohibit discrimination in other aspects of public life such as businesses providing services to the public. That is a double standard.
The decision was also based on the Justices' homophobia. Would the Justices have decided the same way if the parade organizer discriminated against Protestants? Doubtful. This was a decision, which like the Dredd Scott Decision, was based on the willingness of the Justices to treat certain individuals -classifed and reduced to a group - as subhuman.
Mr. Hurley was wrong. If there is a concious afterlife he will understand the wrongness of his belief. But if there exists an afterlife I hope for it is one where he will understand the wrongness of his belief in this life and forgive himself for the harm that he continued.
He - we - all make mistakes - and many cause harm. Hopefully whatever Heaven exists is it large enough for all of us.
Rest in Peace Mr. Hurley. May the good you did redound to more good and may the harm you did teach others what not to do.
damn, for a second there....
...i thought you were talking about Whitey.
I'm curious where you get the
I'm curious where you get the idea that 98% of Americans don't care deeply about their community. Just rhetoric to claim Wacko was better than most of us? 69% of Americans donate to charity
I always knew he had charity, but he's still going out remembered mostly for getting Southie and Boston embroiled in a national bellwether case. Which he did not have to do, and I can see in no way how it helped his community. Except to give others a switch to punish Southie with, metaphorically.
politician
Handing out turkeys at his parish isn't "working behind the scenes;" it's good politics and PR even if he was also motivated by charity. Wacko may very well have helped many people in Southie, but it takes more than that to make someone a good person or a good public servant. He also undermined people in the rest of the city.
I think you and I agree, 100%
I think you and I agree, 100%. :)
Safe travels, if you have any.
You too, and everyone else on UHub!
Especially the poor folks who are driving today.
wacko
Wacko stood up for what was right people forget that.People were incensened when outside interest groups tried to barge their way into the parade. It had nothing to do with being gay or straight. It was about recognizing our veterans and st.patrick. Its the way it was then and the way it is now. Thats what the people of southie wanted then and thats what they want today. Wacko never forgot his roots and people loved him for it. RIP Wacko Hurley
People around town that knew wacko knew him to be a humble genetous man who shared the same values as his neighbors and friends
Are you trying to say there
Are you trying to say there were no gay people in or from South Boston?
Or are you saying there were no gay veterans?
Or, since there are gay veterans, some of whom never made it back, that none of them could ever be from Southie?
lol
A-hem
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-says-yes-same-sex-marriage-n36...
Exactly. I was in Ireland
Exactly. I was in Ireland shortly before they voted for gay marriage and it was evident how more tolerant most people were than homophobes like Hurley.
Condolences to his family and friends.
But it's hard to mourn the inevitable passing of his bigoted, backward ideas.
RIP to both.
well put
.
How about some respect?
Regardless of whether he "ruined" the parade or not,he served the country.Funny how the most "tolerant" of folks are the first to pull names. By the way BullDetector, greetings from the perennial cesspool of Liveleak (if it is THE namesake from there).
Oh Really? You must be the captain of the whaling ship Pequod
Because the name matches, right?
Or maybe you are the 7th king of Israel.
(Rolls eyes)
Inevitable
Time marches on.
Here we all go again, saying
Here we all go again, saying things that do nothing but keep on perpetuating racism, hate, intolerance, ignorance and bigotry. Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Go block a
highway.
Parade rights
All Wacko wanted was a family parade and to do that he had to exclude groups ranging from the KKK to militant pro-life groups. The only problem was he turned the parade into a festival of fools while the largest pro-family parade in Boston became the annual Gay Pride Parade
John 'Wacko' Hurley
RIP
The haters never understood Hurley.
He proudly epitomized parochial South Boston. Thats why you hate him. All the slings and arrows never dissuaded him from taking a stand for his beliefs. They were that his beliefs and its funny reading the comments of the "tolerant" glad to see him gone. Even in death he gets your best hypocrisy.
Let them have their SoBo
Let them have their SoBo parade. Everyone knows it's a hollowed out farce now that exists solely to give people an excuse to status signal.
can we all agree thst it is sometimes difficult...
...to be tolerant of intolerance, rather than get in a pissing match of talking down to people on this post we have never met....by the way, when is the UH convention or a least a pub crawl? face to face might make us a little more civil; either that or it would be a wicked good brawl.
Hmm ...
Not a bad idea at all!
Adam, make it happen!
UHub pub night would be so rad! We can wear our UHub names on those little stickers, "Hello, My Name Is PeyoteEatingWaterBear". Rent out your favorite pub for a night & change a donation for your favorite Boston charity.
Quiz night
look, posters are mostly smart-asses who clearly think they're smarter than most other people - let's make it a quiz night so we can sort that out.
my team
I want michael kerpan on my trivia team.
the quiz master?
Zak.
Mostly questions about district boundaries, I know, but he has a lot of questions.
Most people I work with are smarter than me,
a usefully humbling reality.
But my pub trivia team won this week at my local. In a world where every fact imaginable is at your fingertips, being able to recall odd effluvia you learned in your youth (especially after a few beers) is a dying skill. We're older than most, so we kinda suck at pop music and TV and movies from the last ten years. Nobody not named Ken Jennings is good at everything.
This week, we got lucky: the four or five teams of Millennials that blatantly cheat with their smartphones every week (always near-perfect scores) didn't show up. It's amazing to me, but these kids don't see the difference between a Googling contest and playing actual trivia. (Or they know it's wrong, but hey: twenty-five bucks!) It was a rare honest game, and we ran away with it.
Tolerance is defined by the beholder.
I pretty much disagreed with all things Wacko but anyone having more than a two minute conversation with Wacko understood that he loved his country and the freedom it offered everyone. What he would not cede was that his beliefs or rights were not equal to those opposing his views. Believe what you want, advocate your position but don't hijack his parade. In your face arguments with Wacko never worked. What did? Time and rising real estate values.
I feel like the problem might
I feel like the problem might have been that Wacko wasn't thinking long term. The parade was clearly going to outlast him, and it's never good when organizations get led long term by the same person, when they won't accept any dissent. There's a time to retire for new blood, and then there's sticking around to make sure your views are dominant in the face of modernity and against your own proteges.
He thought his parade, and Southie's parade would always be the same thing, when everyone knew that wouldn't be true some day. Even vets who were on the council with him. But no one could say anything to his face, as you say. So they had to wait until he was too ill to attend meetings anymore and had to resign: http://www.dotnews.com/2015/wacko-hurley-stepping-down-south-boston-alli...
Regardless, RIP John Wacko Hurley. While his antiquated and exclusionary notions of "family values" and "community values" for Southie will never truly die, like old soldiers, they just fade away. And our city will be all the better for it.
There's the rub
In hindsight, the two groups back in the 1990s had concerns that are kind of quaint today (the desire to maintain the family atmosphere of the event versus the desire for a simple way to be recognized as part of the larger Irish community) but things got conflated, lines were drawn, thus ruling out any compromise. In the end, Hurley wasn't going to have anyone make him do something he didn't want to do.
It's great that in the end things worked out with the parade, but it is sad that it took so long for a rational discussion to take place on the issue.
Not a Bad Idea
I always say debating online is a cowards game. Let's do it in person where I can reach you.
I'm betting if Adam had a meetup few would go and those that did would have a LOT less to say in person. It's so much easier to be rude, snarky and ignorant from the comfort of your ergonomic orthopedic chair with extra lumbar support.
Happy Thanksgiving all!
See ya at the meet up!!
but I have a bad back!
That's why I have the ergonomic chair, not to facilitate ignorance...
What?
I have one too! And my back is fine!
The Change From Southie to SoBo
You say that as if it were a positive thing. LOL.
I am glad he was alive to see LGBT march in the parade and I was glad he was around to see South Boston change from angry, racist townies to happy, inclusive yuppies!
- The Original SoBo Yuppie
SoBo Yuppie, the Lumpy Kardashian
of South Boston is an all inclusive person. The condo fees include heat, hot water, trash removal and BMW storage.
Being against intolerance
Being against intolerance(homophobia in this case) is not intolerance. If you can't see the difference then you are beyond help or reason.
This is known as the Pee-Wee Herman Defense,
as in, "I know you are, but what am I?", and it's popular with right-wingers who get steamed when someone points out the fact that they're obviously bigots of one stripe or another.
Yes, it's childish and nonsensical -- "No, you're a bigot for noticing my bigotry!" -- but a playground comeback is the best they can do. Hatred of that sort is tough to defend in rational, adult terms.
one person's homophobia...
..is another's family values.
just look around.
the challenge: where is the common ground?
humanity is a good start.
"Family values": another popular
right-wing euphemism for bigotry and oppression of women, frequently based on religious myths. It doesn't fool anyone.
Your family values end
... where my family - and the families of all others - begin.
Ditto for your homophobia - don't want gay marriage? Don't marry someone of the same gender. Don't think that it is okay to be gay? That ends with your own personal body.
Got it?
yah, I got it; I never lost it.
(I keep forgetting there is so little room for nuance in this space.) half my extended family is from the "fam values" wing so spare me the sermonette which was uncharacteristically cliche. It is actually constructive to have somewhat civil (even if passionate) discussions with those who see the world differently. And I do mean discuss, not sermonize. My point was, forgive me for not being obtuse, is that people are talking past each other (very much like the above) without an inkling of any common ground. it's ok, I guess, if y'all prefer this sure ticket to never getting anywhere on anything.
I don't understand your point.
Do you want me to recognize that even bigots deserve recognition of their humanity? Done.
Now, about that part of them that devalues their own humanity as well as the targets of their bigotry: you want me to honor that, too? Sorry, cannot do that.
Maybe you can give me some tips or examples from your own dealings with the "family values" wing of your family, because I am at a loss on how to find common ground with such people.
MC, all great questions
...and I am with you on the difficulties. Among the great extinctions of this age is the art of persuasion through direct face to face contact. I know for a fact that some of my right-wing family members have been softened in their homophobic tendencies by having and knowing gay friends: couldn't have happened without human interaction. No one had to make a great argument, pass a bill, or chide them in a chat room; it was based on experience and human contact. Although we live in the most cosmopolitan age ever, positions on issues become more calcified (was it in "Bowling Alone" that suggested that the more diverse communities became, the more people circled their physical (gated communities) and social wagons)? enclaves, while perhaps always existing, become formidable and impenetrable out of what? fear. I have no tips and don't consider myself an expert on anything, and my own personal views put me to the left of most people on this site (full disclosure), but so what? Chanting hooray for our side is empowering and often necessary, but I am thinking, perhaps foolishly, that there's gotta be a better way. There is less talking with and more talking at these days...and something is lost. What if there was a forum where folks committed to discussion (talking with) and not so much sermonizing (talking at)....even if opinions are not changed, I don't think it would be a waste of time... there will always be disagreement, but there may be room for agreement on something.
one other point: if someone is an ardent supporter of civil rights but regularly eats at UBurger, would he/she be objectionable to a vegetarian who drives a hummer, or to someone who is gay but votes republican. We all make our battle lines, but are battles more effective as engagements rather than drone strikes?
Wrong
I have zero LGBT friends. I don't interact with any LGBT people.
People should be treated with respect. not that hard.
Except that in my experience, it's true.
I too have seen older folks who were brought up to despise gay people manage to change long-held views. It often happens when a son or daughter or cousin or friend comes out; it's tougher to hold that bigotry when someone you love decides to tell you the truth about something they were born with.
I also suspect that popular culture has helped move the needle: TV shows like Soap, Will & Grace, and Modern Family, as well as many mainstream movies. Once the entertainment industry started with more realistic portrayals of gays in place of awful caricatures, it helped people to feel an empathy for gays that they maybe didn't get in their daily lives because the gay people around them felt so much pressure to stay in the closet.
I find it improbable that you have zero interactions with LGBT folks, but never mind. You may have been able to form more tolerant views within that unlikely bubble, but I think for many people, empathy happens when they must confront the fact that people (or fictional characters) they love don't fit the ignorant stereotypes and despicable myths with which they've been indoctrinated by custom, culture, or religion. Another big factor is a lot of difficult grassroots work by LGBT activists going back decades.
The good news to me is that many younger Americans appear much more accepting of homosexuality and transgenderism in a way that was unimaginable in my own youth. It makes me hopeful that much of the stubborn homophobia and transphobia in this country will simply age out of the populace, like the late Mr. Hurley.
Stallman said it best...
(about Steve Jobs, but it applies equally here)
"I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."