It's a pretty disgusting state of affairs when the determination about whether someone should have been booed off the stage or not is made on the basis of whether someone is conservative or liberal and not on the basis of what they are actually saying.

I don't know this woman. For all I know, she is, of the world's six billion people, the single most hypocritical person in existence. For all her days on this earth prior to that one, she might have been preaching all manner of horrible things, advocating censorship and the infringement of personal freedoms. SO WHAT? What she was saying during THAT SPEECH was a freaking important thing we must all remain sensitive to, and for that reason alone she did not deserve to be booed off stage.

I'm not going to talk about the issue itself in too much detail except to say that it is too complicated to simply be "for" or "against." There is a medium here, with extremes on BOTH sides that are VERY bad. The "balance" nature of the issue, rather than its binary rightness or wrongness, is suggested most clearly, perhaps, by the fact that not all (nor even most of, nor even a significant percentage of) "Middle Eastern guys" are terrorists, while the majority of the terrorists we are currently fighting are, in fact, "Middle Eastern guys." Therefore the balance lies in being intelligent and sensible about conducting the investigation, while at the same time not infringing on personal freedoms and civil liberties or entertaining racial prejudice. Throw in issues of U.S. citizenship, and the issue is complicated further. Some civil liberties are inalienable human rights, while others are granted by U.S. citizenship, and others still *should* be granted to non-citizens on the basis of human decency and common hospitality. Does this sound like a "for" or "against" issue to you? It shouldn't. If it does, then your conclusions, whatever they are, are wrong and maybe even dangerous.

Please don't respond to this post to debate the above paragraph, because that's missing the point. Ellmyruh's original post was about something called human decency. Human decency includes courtesy and excludes prejudice -- either racial *or* political. It provides the proper perspective, even if it does not provide all the answers to the details, for approaching the issue properly. And it also illustrates why this woman should not have been booed off the stage.