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Saturday, May 20, 2000
When I got the news release announcing that Roy Frankhouser, a Ku Klux Klansman of 40 years' standing, was headed for sensitivity training, I immediately called to congratulate him on his forthcoming moral improvement.
This is the same Roy Frankhouser who, upon discovering that a house guest, the No. 2 in the American Nazi Party, was in fact Jewish, had to explain the man's suicide to police. This is the Roy Frankhouser who served time for the theft of high explosives, and later became security adviser to political extremist Lyndon Larouche. This is the Frankhouser whose glass eye went for $50 at a KKK auction.
This is the man the federal government fancies it will rehabilitate? Do not expect The Nation magazine and a frappuccino to show up on his kitchen table anytime soon.
As part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Frankhouser, self-described chaplain to the Klan and pastor of the whites-only Mountain Church of Jesus Christ, has appended a fair housing poster to his house in Reading and includes a fair housing public service announcement at the end of his "White Forum" cable access show. In days to come, Frankhouser must undergo 80 hours of sensitivity training.
"Hey, if the taxpayers want to foot the bill, God bless 'em. If they don't give me lunch, I won't go," he said.
Frankhouser landed in court after he began stalking Bonnie Jouhari, an activist who helped people file housing discrimination complaints. Jouhari complained that Frankhouser began sitting outside her Reading office, took pictures of her and generally intimidated her. At the same time, Ryan Wilson, a computer Nazi from the Philly suburbs, put up photos of Jouhari on his Web site.
Prosecutors couldn't lay a finger on Frankhouser, but Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo brought him into court on misdemeanor complaints of violating the Fair Housing Act.
"I was bankrupted by the legal fees," Frankhouser said.
Hence, the settlement and the four-page HUD news release that makes it sound as if Frankhouser is about to be turned into Eleanor Roosevelt.
It is clear to anybody without a tin ear that Frankhouser is not going to change. Already, he has smothered his fair housing spiel in 90 seconds of other public service advertisements, including a blurb for the local animal shelter. He says he won't stop anybody on his show from discussing Jouhari.
"Clinton and Andrew Cuomo can kiss my rebel derriere," the deeply repentant Frankhouser said. "Yeah, I'm a sensitive guy. I'll end up liking gays, marry a [black] and maybe move to Mexico later on."
I doubt Mexico would have Roy Frankhouser. And as long as the United States has him, we would do well not to let him trick us into looking silly.
The First Amendment was meant to protect the kind of speech in which Frankhouser engages. Popular speech, after all, doesn't require protection. You never hear of the police busting up a meeting of the Optimists Club. When political expression lapses into criminality, civil societies impose fines and jail. When an irredeemable racist is sent to sensitivity training and made to say things he doesn't believe on a show that caters to an audience that won't listen, we are only left to remember how foolish a country gets to look when its secretary of housing becomes a closet attorney general.
Jail him or ignore him. But don't turn Roy Frankhouser into a New Age political martyr.