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GREY

                                    May, 1992

Let's say I (in my capacity as a white guy)          
get into a heated discussion with a black guy.                OLDANDGREY
He gets upset and calls me "stupid white                      
trash".  I get upset and call him a "stupid                   
nigger".  Under the Grey intrepretation, I can                
be brought up on Fun Stan charges, for                        
"harassing" him, but not vice versa.        GREYASSYM         
                                                      
Note that this is a single incident.                 
(Personally, I think the word "harassment"           
implies an ongoing situation, e.g. if I were        The reasoning according
to scream "nigger" outside his window every         to Grey, seems to be that
night.)                                             since these folks may 
                                                    have had to deal with 
Also note, that in the above example it's           a bunch of other dudes
clear that I'm on one side of the Grey line,        screaming a similar 
and the rhetorical black guy is on the other.       epithet, doing it once
If you pick a different group, a different          is really another entry
epithet, it may not be so clear.                    in a campaign of repeated
                                                    harrasment.  
You know, I think the Grey amendment to the          
Fun Stan is amazingly silly and irrelevant.              Completely ignores
It doesn't really address the incidents that             the chilling effect 
led up to it's creation, it's never been                 of this ruling, 
applied to any real case (possibly, because              focusing entirely
they either know it won't stand up or are                on the _victim_'s 
afraid of the consequences if it *did* stand             point of view... 
up).                                                                      
                                                     
So Grey is a joke.  At best it's a symbolic          
issue, and the things it symbolizes to me all        
make it seem incredibly dumb that it was             
enacted and that people defend it.  I mean           
dumb, dumb, dumb!  You can't write a set of          
rules to legislate being Nice without throwing       
away the bill of rights.                             
                                                     
So what's really going on?  I mean, guys like
Grey may not be geniuses, but they're not
(dumb)^3.  So what does it symbolize to
them?                      
                                                          
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