This morning I filed a public records request with the City of Moscow. In that request I asked for “all notes or records of communication between city council members and any other person, regarding a ‘neo-confederate’ resolution and Black History Month proclamation entered at the Moscow City Council meeting of February 3, 2004.” I also requested relevant minutes from the human rights commission.
The reason? If you are one of five basketball players in blue uniforms, and you are playing a team of seven — five red uniforms, and two black and white stripes — the resultant game can be no fun at all. “Yes, we know the ball went through the hoop. It did not count as a score because only you fundamentalists think in black and white terms like this. Continue to push the point, and we will have ourselves a technical.”
We have gotten to the place in our proceedings where we need to know exactly where our elected city officials stand on the harassment that our church and related ministries have undergone over the course of the last several years. Prospective candidates for city council need to be prepared to say whether they think the rash of harassment filings against us are a coincidence or not. And existing council members need to tell us whether they have participated in any way in arranging for these “coincidences.”
I am not making the request because of creeping paranoia. We already have in our possession documented evidence of certain elected city officials actively working in this campaign of harassment against us. So this is not a “fishing expedition” to see if anything like this happened. We already know that it did, and the only question concerns how extensive the problem was.
And, at the very least, such implicated officials ought to recuse themselves from any future tournament play. That is because referees don’t get to dribble or shoot.