Well done…
Via KRTV
Lewis & Clark County Justice of the Peace Mike Swingley weighed in last week on the future of Helena’s Confederate Memorial Fountain, urging the two city commissioners who are pushing for rededication of the monument to “start focusing on your real job.”
“Shame on you both,” Swingley wrote in an email last week to Commissioners Katherine Haque-Hausrath and Andres Haladay.
He suggested that a logical extension of the move to rededicate or otherwise alter the fountain would be to also remove other potentially offensive items.
“If you want to cleanse Helena of of the items that offend the sensitive, I request that you remove the Arabic writing from inside the Civic Center,” he wrote. “It reminds me of the Arabic writing on the flag of ISIS and as 99.9% of the terrorist (sic) in the world have turned out to be Islamic fundamentalist and Arab speaking, it offends me that Helena would allow such a symbol.”
Reached Monday by telephone, Swingley said he had received numerous notes of support since his email was described on the Montana Cowgirl blog. He said the words had been taken out of context.
Haque-Hausrath says the comments are troubling even in context, and judges need to avoid even an appearance of bias.
“Judge Swingley’s statements are deeply troubling because they exhibit such a clear bias toward Arabic and Muslim people that there is no way anyone who might even appear to be Arabic or Muslim could be confident about getting a fair trial in his courtroom,” she wrote in an email to MTN News.
While Swingley may have been trying to make an absurd example of over-reaction to offensive materials, Haque-Hausrath says there’s reason to believe he was serious in what he said about Arabs and Muslims.
“Even if Judge Swingley does not actually want to remove the Arabic writing from the Civic Center, he exhibited clear bias toward Arabic and Muslim people when he said that (he) considers them to be synonymous with terrorism,” she wrote. “Regardless of whether Judge Swingley was trying to tell a joke, or he was under a lot of stress, or had a hard childhood, it is completely unacceptable for a sitting judge to espouse racist views in an official public record.”