When are public officials going to learn to stop sending e-mails that offend others?

Better yet, when are they going to learn that racist, sexist and/or sexually suggestive e-mails just aren't funny?

Not any time soon, it appears.

From The Chronicle's Alan Bernstein this afternoon:

The Harris County Republican Party chairman is calling for a GOP misdemeanor court judge to resign because, using the courthouse computer system, he circulated e-mail in 2006 that ridiculed blacks, Hispanics, women and gays and contained a racial slur.

The judge in question is Larry Standley, judge for County Court at Law No. 6.

Standley's case will make No. 3 in an apparently growing line of Harris County public officials getting outed for sending e-mails that make them look like Neanderthals. DA Chuck Rosenthal was run out out of office earlier this year after he got caught sending around porn. And deputies for the Harris County Sheriff's Department apparently were getting their jollies sending around racist e-mails making fun of blacks and other minorities. (Sheriff Tommy Thomas' solution to the problem: Shred the e-mails. But no, wait, too late -- Wayne Dolcefino has them. Bye, Sheriff Thomas. Hello, Sheriff Garcia.)

But here's something else just as interesting, further down in Bernstein's story: When Standley sent these e-mails two years ago, one of his colleagues -- Judge Mike Fields, the only African-American judge among the group -- sent back an e-mail saying that the jokes were "racist and offensive," Bernstein writes. One judge backed up Fields, but he says the others shunned him.

Was Fields' act of speaking out somehow worse than the sending of the e-mail to begin with?


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