Moments later, Pauly squirted lighter fluid all over a Mexican flag and Lawless bent over to light it. They both spat on it as it burned. Afterward, Pauly, hardly the sharpest hoe in the barn, engaged in a debate with a Mexican-American counterprotester he had accused earlier of being an "anchor baby" — that is, a child born in America to illegal-immigrant parents.
"We'd like anchor babies from Ireland to go back home, too," he assured the girl. "We don't care. We want all immigrants gone. We don't want noncitizens in this country."
Tony Blei
Down by Lawless: The activist (left) and fellow anti-immigrationist Yeh Ling-Ling (right) join forces at the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Courthouse for the January 13 Freedom Riders protest.
Tony Blei
Make her day: Lawless channels Dirty Harry while using a Mexican flag as a doormat during the Freedom Riders event.
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It doesn't seem to bother Pauly that so-called anchor babies are de facto American citizens, but then, this is a guy who, according to Reuters, has called for the sterilization of Mexican women and for illegal immigrants to be shot on sight by Border Patrol snipers. He's not the sort to bother with facts, especially when they don't uphold his own prejudices.
"America is full," he informed the girl. "We want to clean it up."
When she asked why, he let her know it's because he needs the room to shoot his gun.
In any case, the freak show was over, and people cleared out. That eve, Pauly and Lawless shared a catered turkey dinner with about 80 assorted neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers at the National Vanguard's annual Winterfest event, which also featured speeches, white-power poetry readings, and bagpipe and guitar recitals. For attending the racist fete, the Anti-Defamation League will denounce Lawless in a press release as "just another anti-Hispanic bigot using the border issue to forward her own hateful agenda."
A few months later, Lawless remains unapologetic about supping with supremacists, saying she went there out of curiosity. She compares it to the perverse pleasure she gets as a pagan watching fire-breathing Bible-thumpers on cable:
"I sometimes like to watch televangelists for fun, but that doesn't make me a holy roller, now does it?"
Bill Straus, regional director of the Arizona ADL, isn't buying Lawless' excuses, even though he agrees she's not the run-of-the-mill anti-immigrant activist.
"Sometimes in Arizona, don't you have the feeling that somebody went to Central Casting for some of these characters?" he asks, jokingly. Still, Straus regards Lawless and her flag burning with a wary eye, and as proof of the ADL's own warnings about Mexican-bashing nativist-nationalists.
"ADL issued a report on the border in '03," explains Straus. "We were accused by some of crying wolf. We were talking about the ability to attract extremists that this immigration issue's always had — even legal immigration. As these people come out of the woodwork, we try to expose them, generally through a press release. Laine Lawless is one more example."
Straus says he doesn't consider the pistol-packin' Lawless any more dangerous than anybody else trying to use the immigration issue to advance an agenda the ADL regards as "whites only." But he does perceive burning the Mexican flag as a possible incitement to violence.
"She knows what she's doing, and she's playing to her audience," Straus insists. "Unfortunately, there are some people who are going to rally to her."
December 16, 2006, in Phoenix was not the first time Lawless cremated Mexico's national symbol with a little help from her friends. The first time was on April 9, 2006, in front of Tucson's Mexican consulate. Present with her were Tucson activists Russ Dove, a bearded, potbellied former militia group member who looks like he'd be more at home ridin' a Harley, and Roy Warden, who likes to draw a circle around himself, dare his opposition to enter, and promise to blow the freakin' head off anyone who tries. Fortunately, the paunchy, middle-aged Warden hasn't killed anybody, but he was found guilty of assaulting a teenager last year at one of his "don't step foot in my perimeter" parties. The case is currently on appeal.
Despite being a rather modest affair, the April 9 incident made the wire and drew the ire of the Mexican government, whose Foreign Relations Undersecretary, Lourdes Aranda, stated in a news conference, "We consider any provocation or vandalism of national symbols to be unacceptable." But you can't expect someone who changed her name to "Lawless" sometime in the late '90s to heed the dictates of a foreign official. (For the record, she says she was inspired by a co-worker who'd named herself "Outlaw," and was not trying to ape the last name of heartthrob-for-lesbians Lucy Lawless, though it's very likely that the actress playing "Xena" put the bug in her brain.)
Lawless & Co. followed up with a two-flag-burnin' demonstration in Tucson's Armory Park on April 10, a day of nationwide pro-immigrant rallies with Mexican immigrants waving American flags and chanting, "Sí, se puede" ("Yes, we can!") in the streets. Tucson's Mexican-American population swelled Armory Park with about 15,000 marchers. But what they didn't count on was Lawless and her ragtag band of buds yelling, "No, you can't!"
The footage of the April 10 Tucson rally is easily the most watchable part of Lawless' 89-minute documentary How to Burn a Mexican Flag, which she produced and edited from her laptop computer in the RV trailer she calls home, and which she sells for $14.99 via her Border Guardians Web site. The rest of the cottage-industry doc mostly features a gussied-up Lawless, a do-rag-wearin' Russ Dove in granny glasses, and a few other talking heads. Dove, Lawless, and the rest portray themselves as freedom-lovin' patriots who're victims of reprisals for their anti-Mexican stances, but this largely comes off as self-serving back-patting and boo-hooing on their part.
