Honest!

A Baltimore County employee who was demoted and transferred after she complained of co-workers’ “jungle-bunny music” in the office, is seeking to have the punishment overturned.

Graceann Shipe, 42, said she did not know the term is considered racially offensive, attorney C. Stephen Basinger told The Baltimore Examiner, and is appealing in Baltimore County Circuit on the grounds that a statement isn’t a racial slur if it wasn’t intended as one.

Hmm … so a statement isn’t a racial slur if the speaker doesn’t intend it to be, or it isn’t a racial slur because the speaker didn’t intend to be held responsible for it? And ignorance is an acceptable defense?

Not only that, it wasn’t offensive. (Check!)

[The attorney] submitted letters or testimony from 20 people stating they don’t consider the term racially insensitive.

Okay, so she didn’t know it was considered racially offensive, but also people don’t consider it racially offensive. Got it.

Twenty people. At least the attorney didn’t mention that some of them were his closest black friends. In any event, racism generally can’t be decided by voting.

Shipe should also win an award for best bald-faced lie:

Shipe testified before a personnel board that said she used the term because the music reminded her of “the Energizer bunny, loud and obnoxious with noisy, banging cymbals.”

Why, this is almost as good as George Allen’s macaca excuse: I didn’t know what ‘macaca’ meant, and in any event it was a play on words with ‘mohawk,’ because of his haircut! Yeah, that’s it!