No Satanic Peace Symbols, If You Please
Posted on November 27th, 2006
by Daniel Larison |
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A homeowners’ association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.
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The association in this 200-home subdivision 270 miles southwest of Denver has sent a letter to her saying that residents were offended by the sign and the board “will not allow signs, flags etc. that can be considered divisive.”
The subdivision’s rules say no signs, billboards or advertising are permitted without the consent of the architectural control committee.
Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything.
Kearns fired all five committee members. ~CNN
Via Clark Stooksbury
You have to admire the pettiness of people in these little positions of power. It will accomplish nothing of value, but Kearns has made his point and established his authority over the subdivision!
A wreath in the shape of a peace sign is so innocuous and inoffensive that it probably ranks among the more neutral symbols one might put up to express the desire for “peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” Were this to happen on a university campus and a professor or student were prohibited from having some sort of explicitly Christian symbol or message on his office or dorm room door at Christmastime, you had better believe that we would be hearing about religious discrimination and the godless oppressors of academe (and these critics would have a good point). But it does not require much imagination to guess that the response from the professional War on Christmas watchers will be one of silence or only the mildest of rebukes. The assumption that a peace symbol during the Christmas season must have overtly political meaning is simply amazing. This makes roughly as much sense as those who think that creches on public property are the first step towards theocratic domination.
More depressing in a way than this pointless attack on a harmless wreath is the deadening uniformity that this association can impose on the subdivision’s homeowners. Leave it to naturally conformist Americans to create private bureaucracies and committees to ensure homogeneity and uniformity of appearances. This reminds me of nothing so much as Californians and other transplants who move into semi-rural or small-town locations in the Southwest and set about trying to regularise everything and bring it up to their own codes of zoning and restrictions. Rustic and charming have their limits, after all.
Update: Bob Kearns is really out on a limb–even Don Surber realises that Kearns is being a fool.
Filed under: miscellaneous
3 Responses to “No Satanic Peace Symbols, If You Please”
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The irony is that homeowner’s associations, which should be a cornerstone of community, tend to be a bastion of extreme individualism and NIMBYism. I lived in a planned “New Urbanist” community in San Diego for a couple of years. There was nothing even approaching community, even though the physical environment was created for it. The day I moved my next door neighbor said, “We are going to miss you John.”
I’m not a big fan of the peace symbol, which evokes pro-communist “peace” marches that took place before Daniel was born. Its connotations for me, however, hardly justify banning it.
Moreover, the homeowner associations don’t just pick on peaceniks. If your American flag is too big, or you wash your car in the driveway, you can be in big trouble. These outfits are often harmless or even useful, but when they get out of control, they can be the bourgeois analogue to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
Small cities like Laguna Beach also try to micromanage people’s lives, with local boards exercising unfettered discretion over all kinds of things. Although without castor oil and rubber hoses, it may be hyperbolically styled “environmental fascism.â€
This stuff is far from trivial. If we can’t have a bit of breathing room in our own condo or neighborhood, why even bother with things like the incarceration of Judith Miller or the peccadilloes of John Kerry and Trent Lott?
I despise the Nanny State whether it’s next door or in Washington DC.
I am surprised you would knock the “conformity” of the suburbs. Who have you become Daniel? The Graduate?!? Marcuse?
The older communities we conservatives defend had a great deal of enforced uniformity. You couldn’t be an open homosexual for example, nor could you run around naked. If you spouted heresies you stood a good chance of getting punished in more severe ways than an HOA fine, at least until the 18th Century or so. In the United States, blacks were kept out of many subdivisions until the 1940s through restrictive racial covenants. So too were gambling, drinking, and other behaviors restricted under the rubric of “public and private nuisance.” The core American tradition hardly requires us to tolerate Camaros on blocks in people’s front yards.
The old America was one of a great deal of forced conformism. And it even extended to matters of politics and war and peace. Consider the Palmer Raids or the oppressions meted out to Unionist Southerners from your favorite folks. My God, consider the Bleeding Kansas episode.
Anyway, forced conformism is the price of civilization. And, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live near hippies and neither should any other sane and civilized American conservative. They can have their peace symbols and peace pipes in their squalid communes, thank you very much. They should be messed with simply because so many of them are disloyal and otherwise disagreeable. Tolerance is overrated, particularly of treachery, and doubly so of people that show so little tolerance for our intolerance of various things–homosexuals, communists, subversives, criminals, undesirables of various stripes.