Warning: May Offend Gays, Police Officers, Horses or Those Who Love or Hate Them
Possibly Gay Horse
Brit Sam Brown, a student at Oxford, was arrested a few years ago during a night out, when he ask a mounted police officer “Excuse me, do you realize your horse is gay?”
He was charged under Section Five of Britain’s Public Order Act for uttering in this case, a “homophobic insult.”
Apparently the unsolicited observation of the horse’s sexuality was deemed an insult as if it is automatically insulting to be gay.
Enter Mr. Bean
Mr. Bean
Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a., Mr. Bean, has been in the vanguard of encouraging a change to the public law that would result in the word “insulting” being removed.
Bean, incurably silly, is the perfect person to lead a crusade on the absurd.
But the real issue is not the notion of an “insult” but rather, how police officers misuse laws to punish petty or boorish behavior they seem not to like.
In Britain, at least, laws are being amended to protect the citizens from the police.