The Patriot Post® · Lives Matter

Deputy Darren Goforth was gunned down at a Harris County, Texas, gas station Friday evening when he stopped to fill up his squad car. He was 47, and he leaves behind a wife and two young children. The execution-style murder appeared unprovoked, though there is an unmistakable angle of racism and anti-cop hatred.

Security footage shows the murderer, who is black, come up behind and shoot 15 rounds into Goforth, who is white. Law enforcement has a theory to why the killer did it. In a press conference, an obviously emotional Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman pinned the blame for this murder on the angry rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests. “This rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said. “We’ve heard ‘black lives matter,’ ‘all lives matter.’ Well, cops’ lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter’?”

To be sure, blacks aren’t the only ones killing law enforcement personnel. A deranged white man in Louisiana brutally murdered a state patrol officer last weekend. Fourteen officers were killed in August by perpetrators of different races.

Barack Obama condemned the “completely unacceptable” targeting of police officers as “an affront to civilized society,” and he promised to “continue to highlight the uncommon bravery that police officers show in our communities every single day.” Yet he has also driven some of the anti-police sentiment with his irresponsible rhetoric.

Late last year, after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the 21st Century Policing Task Force, which Mark Alexander labeled “a $265 million charade based on the underlying assumption that cops generally have racial biases.”

They claimed their goal is an “honest conversation” about disparate treatment of blacks by law enforcement. “When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that is a problem,” Obama said then. “And it’s my job as president to help solve it.”

After reading the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, it’s hard to conclude there isn’t a real problem in at least that police department, and likely many others. Police are human, after all. But, as Alexander also noted, “This ‘problem’ of ‘not being treated equally’ is Obamaspeak for ‘cops are racists.’” It’s far too broad a brush.

To further illustrate those assumptions, Obama said, “A combination of bad training [and] departments that really are not trying to root out biases, or tolerate sloppy police work; a combination in some cases of folks just not knowing any better, and, in a lot of cases, subconscious fear of folks who look different — all of this contributes to a national problem that’s going to require a national solution.”

So while it’s appropriate and welcome for Obama to express outrage at Goforth’s murder, it’s a stark contrast to his previous rhetoric.

Indeed, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke blasted Obama, saying, “I’m disgusted there’s been no sense of urgency by the president of the United States over these cop killings. Look, he breathed life into this anti-cop sentiment, this cop hatred, and he stands by as it goes on. He went out and visited a federal prison, for heaven’s sake — federal prisoners and he pardoned 46 of them.”

That said, it goes too far to lay the blame for these murders squarely on Obama’s shoulders. Each cop killer is responsible for his own actions. To argue differently falls into the same line of thinking that causes leftists to blame Sarah Palin’s Facebook page for the lunatic who killed six near Tucson and wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, or the race-baiting hoards that blamed a flag for the Charleston murders.

But there’s an unmistakable thread of racial hate being fomented among blacks by the nation’s first black president — a man whose election was supposed to herald a new age of racial harmony. Instead, our cities are suffering race riots reminiscent of the 1960s and tension between blacks and law enforcement is at a boiling point. A deranged and angry black homosexual just murdered two white journalists on live TV last week because he followed through on hateful racist sentiment.

For some blacks in the “Black Lives Matter” movement, this is about revenge — revenge for real oppression like slavery and Jim Crow but also every perceived slight or different outcome.

Just two weeks before Goforth was murdered, armed Black Panthers shouted, “We will start creeping up on you in the darkness” — exactly what Goforth’s killer did. Another Black Lives Matter rally featured protesters chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” An LA “life coach” tweeted after Goforth’s murder “this is what justice looks like.” We can only hope such abhorrent ideas are held by a tiny minority.

What justice looks like is proper punishment for crimes. What justice looks like is cooperation between law enforcement and the general population. What justice looks like is no longer aborting more black babies than are born alive. An astounding 16 million preborn black lives have been snuffed out since 1973. Do those black lives matter?

The bottom line is, as Sheriff Hickman put it, lives matter. But in a culture of death, that’s a more difficult message to get through than it should be.