... writes about the rash of 10 church destroying arson fires in Alabama. The churches are all Baptist churches. He writes about the unwillingness of some on the Left to even entertain the possibility that these fires are motivated by anti-Christian bigotry and hatred. I am not suggesting that they are "hate crimes," but Jacoby is correct in his questions.
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'I don't see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes," Mark Potok, a director of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times. ''Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South."
But are anti-Christian crimes really that rare? Or are they simply less interesting to the left, which prefers to cast Christians as victimizers, not victims?
A search of the SPLC's website, for example, turns up no references to Jay Scott Ballinger, a self-described Satan worshiper deeply hostile to Christianity, who was sentenced to life in prison for burning 26 churches between 1994 and 1999. Yet if those weren't ''hate crimes," what were they?
Running through the coverage of the latest church burnings is an almost palpable yearning to cast the story in racial terms. ''Federal investigators are looking for two white men for questioning in connection with a string of church fires in central Alabama," began a National Public Radio story on Friday. ''Race may be a factor." In fact, race seems not to be a factor at all -- five of the churches had mostly white congregations, five were largely black. To a media ever ready to expose racism in American culture, the arsonists' lack of regard for skin color must be maddening.
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