Ocean City, MD features Boykin, promoter of bigotry & discrimination, at Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast
Regardless of the fact that the city has no official connection to the event, and that Mayor Rick Meehan’s presence was only ceremonial, it’s beyond beyond revolting that in this day and age a resort town like Ocean City, Maryland would feature a speaker with a substantial documented history of promoting religious bigotry and discrimination.
If you’re Muslim, have Muslim family members or friends, or if you’re simply a person who believes that religious bigotry and discrimination should be opposed on moral grounds, then if you have plans to vacation in Ocean City, MD, you might want to change your itinerary.
If you’re looking for a family-friendly town on the mid-Atlantic seaboard, I can personally highly recommend Ocean City, New Jersey. It’s beautiful, clean, has a boardwalk with plenty of shops & great little amusement park, and it doesn’t give platforms to known purveyors of hatred. Oh, and it doesn’t allow the sale of alcohol—or at least it didn’t when I lived close by in Atlantic City—however you can BYOB.
Breakfast with Boykin
Retired Gen. Jerry Boykin was the featured speaker at this morning’s “Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast” in Ocean City, in spite of calls for city officials not to give a platform to the promoter of religious bigotry and discrimination. RWW has documented that Boykin has spent much of his retirement calling for American Muslims to be denied the protection of the First Amendment and denied the right to build mosques for worship. Boykin has also insisted that President Obama is building a Hitlerian army of brownshirts to force Marxism down Americans’ throats.
Over the past week more than 1600 individuals contacted city officials to ask that they distance themselves from Boykin’s religious bigotry and extremism. and other civil rights and social justice organizations joined PFAW’s Michael Keegan in criticizing Ocean City officials for associating the city’s good name with Boykin. […]
From The Baltimore Sun, prior to this morning’s breakfast:
Religious bigotry in Ocean City?
[…] Make no mistake: This is not an issue of freedom of speech or of any of the constitution’s protections for religious expression that Mr. Boykin seems so eager to deny to those who don’t share his own Christian faith. Mr. Boykin has every right to say whatever outrageously offensive and hateful things about Muslims pop into his head, and the private organizers of an Ocean City prayer breakfast have the right to invite him to speak. Likewise, Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan and the town council can attend the breakfast if they so choose. What they cannot do, however, is pretend that their presence there won’t reflect badly on them and the resort town they lead. They need to make clear whether they agree with Mr. Boykin’s views, they need to do it immediately and they need to do it publicly.
Here’s a sampling of the type of person Ocean City, MD felt is was appropriate to invite to a prayer breakfast that’s supposedly designed to bring together “clergy, citizens and visitors of all faiths”—note that he has also compared the President of the United States to a Nazi brownshirt:
Boykin: There Can Be No Interfaith Dialogue Between Muslims and Christians
Boykin: Christians Must Go On The Offensive Against Islam
Boykin: Islam “Should Not Be Protected Under the First Amendment”
Boykin: “No Mosques In America”
Boykin: Obama Creating Personal Brownshirt Army To Enforce Marxism
Shame on you, Ocean City, MD. Who will you invite next year, David Duke?
Official Twitter page of the Ocean City, Maryland Department of Tourism.
