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EITHER WE BELIEVE IN FREEDOM OF RELIGION, OR WE DON'T
07/19/2010
In today’s Los Angeles Times, there is an article about a clash in Temecula, CA, where I live, between a small group of Muslims (150 families) who wish to build a mosque here, and some extremely ignorant and intolerant residents of the city who fear radicals and terrorists showing up and Temecula becoming a training ground for Al Qaeda. As one 68 year old Baptist woman said, "They say they're not radicals, but how do we know?..Right now we're at war with the Taliban and the Muslims and our boys are over there fighting and dying for our freedom. What would it be like if they come home and found out we just let them in the front door?"
Good Grief! There are so many ignorant and shameful things about this statement I almost don’t know where to begin. First of all, Taliban and Muslim are not synomyms (for the woman whose quote I am discussing, that means they mean two different things.) We are not fighting all “the Muslims” who happen to comprise 22% of all people in the world. Members of the Taliban may practice the Muslim faith, but there are Muslims all over the world who have nothing to do with the Taliban. The Taliban is a small group of extremely conservative Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan who demand rigid adherence to the Koran, much as some American Christian fundamentalists demand strict adherence to the Bible. Furthermore, the Taliban are not even al Qaeda, our real enemies. They may be their enablers, but it was not the Taliban who rammed planes into our buildings on 9/11. It was al Qaeda, all foreign born, none of them American Muslims.
Secondly, whom does she mean by "we?" I'm not fighting anyone.
Third, it is completely erroneous to speak of "our boys" who are fighting. This isn't WWII. There are no boys fighting over in Afghanistan. There are men. Eveyone fighting is legally of age, and many are well past their twenties. Furthermore, there are many women in the Armed Services in Afghanistan, some who have died.
Finally, our men and women are not “over there fighting for our freedom.” We are already free and have been for 250 years, and there is no threat to our freedom except in the paranoid minds of Sarah Palin followers and radical teabaggers who somehow have jumped into an imaginary time machine and think they’re back in the days of Paul Revere fighting an enemy on our soil. We are in Afghanistan to nation build, to make the democratically, albeit corrupt, government strong enough to keep the Taliban from taking over, and to keep al Qaeda out. That isn’t fighting for our freedom. That’s fighting for Afghanistan’s freedom.
Now let’s consider this. There are lots of white, American neo-Nazis who have made death threats against public officials, including the president, because in their paranoid minds they think these officials are coming for their guns, which of course, they aren’t. Many of these claim to be Christians, though in my view they are far from it. Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle says "second amendment solutions" should be used against Harry Reid, her opponent, and she claims to be a devout Christian. So should we prevent the building of Christian churches because some of their members are radicals?
How about this? There are hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States who have molested children. Should we ban the building of all new Catholic churches just in case the priest assigned to the parish can’t keep his hands off kids? Should all Catholics be considered radicals because some of their priests are depraved?
I’m sick to death of the paranoia, the ignorance and the intolerance in a large segment of our society. It would be nice if they would fade into the background, but they won’t, and I won’t demand that they do because we have something called the Bill of Rights in this nation that guarantees them the right to say any asinine thing they want to say. But the Bill of Rights also guarantees freedom of worship, and this group of radicals, many claiming to be "Christian," want to deny that freedom to their neighbors because those neighbors don’t believe in the particular set of ideas they believe in, and because a few members of the same religion, half a world away, are violent. Well, some Christians were pretty violent during the Crusades and the Inquisition, and many in the American South, claiming to be god-fearing Christians, lynched black men for the crime of being black, as recently as a few decades ago.
The Muslims who wish to build a mosque in Temecula have been here since 2000. They are our neighbors, they are non-violent, and they are just as entitled to their beliefs as any Christian or Jew or Buddhist is entitled to hers. Some people need to stop with the fear mongering and decide if they believe in freedom of religion or they don’t. Because if the majority of people in this country don’t believe in freedom of religion, I’m all for closing any church that promotes bigotry and hatred or allows and then covers up the molestation of children.
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