SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Two green Adopt-A-Highway signs reading “American Nazi Party” have popped up on a rural road a few miles from downtown, and it’s got people upset with the county for agreeing to put up the signs and worried about their neighborhood.
“I know we live in a free world. But that’s not part of freedom, anything to do with the Nazis,” said Barbara Hamblin, a 64-year-old who lives in a mobile home park just down the road from one of the signs.
“They had to have been off their rocker,” she said.
The two signs were erected by Marion County road crews earlier this week, costing taxpayers $250 each.
County officials said they know people are upset. But free-speech guarantees in the Constitution prevented them from turning down the person who signed the American Nazi Party up with the local Adopt-A-Highway program.
The name of the organization that adopted the highway was also in big letters. Here it is.
“NAMBLA INC.”
Then it said, “KEEP ILLINOIS CLEAN.”
Seeing the NAMBLA name up there irritated Broehl. He served on police departments in the northwest suburbs until he left to become a homicide detective in Atlanta. Cops know what it stands for.
NAMBLA stands for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. According to news articles and the group’s Web site, it advocates changing those old-fashioned laws about sex with minors, including very young kids. It advocates pedophilia.
The only time pedophiles should be cleaning highways is when they are accompanied by prison guards and wearing leg-irons and bright orange uniforms. Pedophiles should never be released from prison. They can’t be rehabilitated. There’s something inside them beyond repair.
But there they were on the highway–NAMBLA and KEEP ILLINOIS CLEAN.
“Our politicians all jumped to get publicity on that registered sex-offender law,” Broehl said, “even if the list includes some kid who was 17 and had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend after school, he’s a sex offender. The politicians were all over it. But NAMBLA gets to adopt a highway. Fantastic.”
I think the Adopt A Highway program needs an overhaul if groups like this are allowed to get in. If you think that’s bad, look at the rest:
At an IDOT meeting, Martin said, one official told him that legally, NAMBLA might have the right to the sign, given a recent court case in Missouri in which the Ku Klux Klan retained its name on a similar adopt-a-highway sign on 1st Amendment grounds.
Martin called the official a lunatic and demanded a full review of the program. He also spoke in French to make himself perfectly clear.
“I’ve heard about the KKK in Missouri, but let me tell you, we won’t have NAMBLA signs on Illinois highways,” Martin told me. “They can sue. But there won’t be any NAMBLA signs.”