Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Have your cake and hate it too


I saw this delightful news item yesterday:
Awwww!
Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset that a grocery store in New Jersey refused their request to inscribe a birthday cake with their son's full name, Adolph Hitler Campbell. That's mom and dad with young Adolph in the picture to the right. Their other two children (not pictured) are daughters JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell who will turn 2 soon and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell who will be 1 in April. The good news for humanity is that these two found each other, thereby saving two other people from hooking up with them. The bad news is they're breeding. Rapidly.
Heath says they're not fanatical about white supremacy and one look at Deborah's teeth backs that up. He says he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically and that he doesn't plan to impose those values on his children. Mr Campbell said he even had mixed-race children at Adolph's birthday party. "If we're so racist, then why would I have them come into my home?," he said in a preview of the speech he plans to give when he accepts the Nobel Prize some day. "Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That's fine, I don't really care. That's his choice," he said.
He also said he doesn't understand the Führer furor over something like a person's name. "I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past," said the man who named his child after a World War II dictator. He just wanted the kid to stand out. "No one else in the world would have that name", he said, citing that there was a whole family of Liberaces living on their block and that he went to school with a boy named Sue. "Other kids get their cake," he complained. "I get a hard time. It's not fair to my children. How can a name be offensive?"
Some people, while not supportive of the Campbells and their passive aggressive 'What? It's just a child's full legal name completely spelled out on a birthday cake with a swastika on it' message, wonder if their right to free speech has been unfairly restricted, an act that would make the Founding Fathers roll over in their graves. While it's not known how the original signers of the constitution felt about a merchant's right to decline business in the interest of exercising good taste and discretion or the expression of unpopular ideas via baked goods, if women being allowed to vote and blacks being allowed to play baseball didn't already have them spinning like turbines strong enough to power a shopping mall, it's hard to imagine something like this getting them to budge.
Regardless, the story has a happy ending if you love cake and bigotry. The Campbells took their business to a local Wal Mart, which was more than happy to do anything for a buck grant the Campbell family their birthday wish.

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