Well, this is something you don’t run across too often. Apparently, some Amish guys in Ohio have been accused of hate crimes for cutting other men’s beards. First things first, you never mess with another man’s beard. That is just asking for a basket of pain.
What I find is so funny is that the Amish are so well behaved that cutting a beard is probably their equivalent of a gang shooting. I’m sure the gossip of this event will travel on for generations within their community.
So an attack on a man’s beard is an attack on him and the perpetrator should be prosecuted. That being said, “hate crimes” are ridiculous. Whatever the motive for the crime doesn’t change the fact that a crime was committed. The government creating hate crimes only gives more grey laws for judges and police to take advantage of individuals.
But getting back to the Amish, did you know that they don’t have mustaches because they are pacifists and in their mind mustaches are worn by military leaders. They aren’t the first culture where beards are such an important status symbol and throughout time the risk of losing your beard would keep you in line from doing bad things. Many religions still emphasize the importance of having a beard including Orthodox Jews, Sikh, and Christianity (although it seems it has fallen out of flavor).
Take a look at some of the photos of the accused and read the full article below.
Source: CBS News
Click the image to scroll through
January 13, 2012 at 9:39 pm
First of all great article! Second, weren’t you just the bearded man of the month on the beardedgents.com website! And third, they must have been really brutal to get a man by the beard and be able to hold him down while they cut it.
January 14, 2012 at 10:07 am
Yup, that’s me I’m most frequently on Bearded Gents and BeardBoard. Knowing what I know of Amish (which is very little) I would think they are pacifist against petty crime as well, so they in theory shouldn’t have resisted if they didn’t feel their life was in danger. But I could be way off.
January 17, 2012 at 12:05 pm
well if one get to the fathom of the story, one man in the community was a kind of a guru and was seducing the wives of the other men. They rebelled of course and as a consquence beards were shaved off in uproars and fights or as vindictive acts of offence against individuals. I was quite amazed to read a whole page article about the Amish in “La Repubblica”, an Italian daily.
take care
Philippe