Just In Case...

...you were under the impression that only Conservatives can be bigoted, narrow-minded and clueless, comes this from John Aravosis at AmericaBlog. Some of the comments are very well thought-out, the ones that don't just consist of screaming obscenities at John, who is otherwise about as liberal as they get. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, being from the South, that football can sometimes be thicker than water, but John's arguments, especially that Indians have to "prove" that a particular image is offensive, is asinine. In case you aren't interested in scrolling through 400+ comments to find mine, my point was this: the question boils down to, who gets to decide whether depictions of Indians and Indian sacred artifacts are "offensive" or not? Indians or white people? We would never EVER in a million years tolerate these kind of depictions of ANY other racial or ethnic group or their use as "mascots," whether they were intended to "honor" them or not. Why then are Indians held to a different standard? Not far from my home, we have the Alvarado Indians and the Sq**w Valley Golf Course; does it matter what the intent of Alvarado ISD or the Sq**w Valley Country Club was? Alvarado is still using a stereotypical picture of an Indian in a feathered headdress as a good luck fetish for teenage football players and the Country Club is still using a sexual and racial epithet to encourage people to play golf.
Hat tip to Wampum.

UPDATE: Pandagon suggests this is a cyclical phenomenon, like a plague of locusts, perhaps.

UPDATE 2: And that's all folks...

UPDATE 3: Avarosis has disabled the link to his original post and has evidently been deleting comments left and right. Fortunately, Wampum has preserved the comments at her site.