Like the right of the First Lady and her nine-year-old daughter to visit Spain for a few days, much less the right to marry in California while gay even if white conservative Christian activists determined to take over State via Church slam their very existence as “tacky” or “unwise” oh, or “disrespectful” (code for offensive to real Americans), uppity rival religions anywhere in this great nation obviously can’t count on the Constitution in the same way those same white conservative Christians demand as THEIR god-given right.
Glenn Greenwald:
This is one of the most impressive and commendable things Obama has done since being inaugurated . . . what makes it particularly commendable is that there is no political gain to be had from doing it, and substantial political risk.
Justin Elliot: “[N]early 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast?”
See the Salon timeline of orchestrated mass hysteria on a cracker, a la Joe McCarthy:
To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.
Here’s a timeline of how it all happened:
Harry Reid Says Mosque Should Be Built Somewhere Else
Angle and Vitter Issue Unasked-for Opinions on “Ground Zero Mosque”
Newt Gingrich is claiming we’d never accept a Nazi billboard next to the Holocaust Museum ergo no mosques near Ground Zero.
From an old comment in that old logic-impaired battle:
And from a post called Nudes and Prudes:
Andy Borowitz just Tweeted:
Mike Barnicle on Morning Joe just charged Newt Gingrich with “political pyromania” for bringing Nazis and the Holocaust into it, and “trying to ignite a fire where a very low flame exists.”
Now Pat Buchanan is saying “we’re gonna have ourselves a real cultural war” because the flames have been fanned so much that it’s “gone global” (for which Hamas is to blame, of course, not any of the Christian culture warriors on his team!)
He’s practically cackling and rubbing his hands with satisfaction . . .
We’ve been having a culture war, at least since Buchanan himself was White House staff to Nixon, but it’s a civil war right here at home, not some grand crusade against the infidels overseas.
Truthout comments from Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Robinson invoke Thomas Jefferson rather than Hitler:
PANDERING OVER A MOSQUE
And respect for the sanctity of Ground Zero? Just another inflammatory lie. This culture war is being waged by extremist Christian conservatives to dominate and/or destroy all of America, not just lower Manhattan:
Ironically, religious fundamentalism has gotten away with these terror tactics so far largely because real Americans DO respect our religious and ideological differences so much. But let’s face it, we ARE at war against religious fundamentalism and it’s clearer than ever that we’re gonna have to call it out and fight it here first, no longer defer to any side brandishing a cross, if we hope to protect “the real America” for ourselves and our posterity . . .
Cock of the snook to sam for the Lord’s Resistance Army link:
Who Says All Religions Are the Same? by interfaith minister Philip Goldberg:
“And respect for the sanctity of Ground Zero?”
What sanctity? The dead people don’t care what is built there and it is too valuable a piece of real estate to be left in the hands of the superstitious.
Local university NPR news this am as I was waking up to radio: big business PR conference here, all about using Twitter and FB to aggressively market to the young etc. Then the last speaker starts his part with, “I am smarter than Einstein, richer than Howard Hughes and I’m more beautiful even than Marilyn Monroe — yeah, I really am. (to laughter) You know why? Because they’re all DEAD.”
He went on to talk about time and real human relationships. I was thinking he should do some school accountability consulting . . .
The new line is “sure it’s constitutional” but it makes everyone else feel uncomfortable so it must be stopped. This is another whole can of worms I was pondering, when Dr. Wendy Walsh of “momlogic dot com” comes on my teevee, being interviewed about the case of a 13-month-old baby being hit in the face by her mom on an airplane, en route. (The baby already had a black eye. ) So the flight attendant offered to help soothe the baby while the parents continued fighting, and took it to the back. CPS or police were called and the parents interviewed when the plane landed, and they claimed a dog bit the baby in the face hence the black eye. (What kind of parenting is THAT?? Is the dog still allowed access to the baby — is the dog still alive? It wouldn’t be if it had been my baby) Mom admitted striking her (already eye-blackened??) child in the face but said said the baby “kicked me so I popped her.”
So the baby goes right back to the parents and they fly off on another plane, baby at their mercy. Apocryphal babyface-biting dog, who knows?
Anyway, this is inappropriate and I feel very uncomfortable! Dr. Walsh says that all of us get uncomfortable say, walking through the park seeing how parents are treating their children including hitting them and hitting a baby is NEVER good parenting but there’s really nothing to do about it, except think how inappropriate it is and keep walking by, or offer to help out for a moment (which won’t help anyone for long) . . . some doctor, some system, huh?
The mosque demagoguers are the same ones demanding the right to do whatever they want to their babies including whipping and smacking and “popping” them as some sort of sacred parental right, whether it “makes the rest of us uncomfortable” or not and never mind whether the kids are all right. So where does that leave American values?
More directly to the conservatives’ new point about what we CAN do v. what we SHOULD do, comes Greta Van Susteren of FOX using this distinction against her conservative corporate colleague:
It really is a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Now It’s perfectly legal free speech to lie about military honors and valor, even if you’re any kind of public official — but is it appropriate??
And let’s think about this decision a bit:
S’okay with me. I would say the anti-prop 8 people’s lies are hurting individuals and society, so it’s a compelling need to limit them. And lying about dogbites so you can keep hitting your baby in the face without interference? Definitely –
I’m assuming you’re talking about Cordoba House, the actual name of the place in question. But then again this is how the right wing go about business, this nasty game of semantics wherein they use language incorrectly to drive wedges between people. Marriage equality becomes anti-traditional marriage, and pro choice becomes pro abortion.
Of course, Cordoba House, the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan doesn’t deliver the same punch as GROUND ZERO MOSQUE BOOOO THEY’RE GONNA EAT YOUR BABIES!!!1!
Actually, they changed the name to Park 51 – since Gingrich had convinced the idiot brigade that Cordoba was some secret reference to conquering the Christians in Spain 800 years ago.
I like calling it the Burlington Coat Factory building. I think that is in keeping with the original intent of the building, as the founders would have wanted.
Nance
this is how the right wing go about business, this nasty game of semantics wherein they use language incorrectly to drive wedges between people.
Right. “Islam is of the Devil” is Christian hate speech certainly “inappropriate” even if the Constitution permits it (short of becoming an imminent threat, which is pretty short these days!)
Take my state’s current holier-than-thou attorney general Bill McCollum (remember him from holier-than-thou Clinton impeachment as civil war?)
McCollum wants to be our NEXT governor now, as if the Catholic Terri Schiavo kidnapper [Jeb Bush] followed by the hurricane pray-away panderer [Charlie Crist] weren’t more than what I should be called upon in one lifetime to endure from ruling “Christians” calling it American . . .
From “Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All That Bites You”:
“A patriotic song is an emotion and you must not embarrass an audience with it, or they will hate your guts.”
–Irving Berlin, father of the beloved “God Bless America”
By birth Irving Berlin shared neither god nor country with patriotic Christian Americans. No, he was born Jewish and Russian — personal background seldom endearing to the religious right — his family soon fleeing the latter because of the former. . .
he honeymooned in CUBA with his first wife, a bad idea that killed her. He then married a Catholic whose prominent family disapproved of their mixed-faith match.
. . .So for us as his audience, what [Jew-and-Muslim-segregating, immigrant-targeting, red-baiting, holier-than-thou, rah-rah-real-American] truth lies in that?
Well, in addition to his lifelong support for our military, he was honored in 1944 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for “advancing the aims of the conference to eliminate religious and racial conflict.”
Gre-a-at. This is my hometown, the university town where I grew up and studied and worked, where I was a quiet, polite moderate to what seemed like everyone else’s active and assertive liberalism!
First Islam Is of the Devil shirts at school and now this? (Talk about the devil.)
Rick Lazio (R-NY) is on Meet the Press today insisting that this has nothing to do with victim sensitivities much less politics or religion! — nope, not to do with anything but the importance of financial transparency, that for our national security all religious funding must be examined (by him?) for approval before religious outreach can be conducted — or maybe he means only construction of all places of worship, or just this one particular place, or only the Muslim places, or only all non-Christian places?
Or more likely what he really means is how easy the lies have become.
Are all the churches going to open their books to public inspection?
That was this inquiring mind’s question, yep, yep . . .
And after they do, they’ll wait patiently until you and I personally approve their plans for expansion, I’m sure.
Leonard Pitts:
And when it’s not lies, it’s some seriously, perhaps even scientifically messed-up minds; see Thinking We’re Thinking Is What’s Wrong:
. . .The overall findings suggest to me that no human decision-making process, by individuals only or groups only or any combination such as we use for parenting and culture, politics and policy, is ever really “natural” and “right” while all other approaches are manipulative, biased and wrong.
Each “has value” and also is “about values.” Which is both good and bad, functional and dysfunctional, at the same time in different applications, in various measure. Each has pros and cons, natural and hidden bias, etc.
Think of business managment and education administration decisions such as admissions, also all levels of government *including* church governance and its decision-making by individuals and groups.
Whatever one believes about the divine, it is clear that church governance is humans making decisions and thus imperfect, even as it promises and tries to deliver the reliable comfort of infallibility and tradition, definitions and ordering of knowledge, discernible identity and state of being.
(And historically, we know even scripture/gospel was selected, categorized and ordered by humans, with human biases and assumptions and uncertainties — so I’d argue the current research findings apply and can help us understand that better too, toward ultimate human goals.)
Bruce Feiler is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths and America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America, which will be released in paperback next month.
Silly wabbit.
The “compromise” talk sounds like such garbage to me. Especially on a day when I am headed to vote. Should women have compromised away that right?
And on NPR this morning I was warned that the scary Muslim bloggers are all in favor of continued fighting so we should hurry up and compromise already. Bite me, scary Muslim bloggers. We have stupid fights like this all the time in this country and the answer is not to cave in to hate and fear.
(crossposted from the money-for-blogging discussion)
Did you see Jon Stewart last night?? About FOX giving a million to anti-Muslim politics while having their own Saudi prince on board?
The best real journalism on faux news . . .’FIGHT RADICAL ISLAM BY TURNING OFF FOX’
New wrinkle today: comes now the only place of worship actually destroyed on 9/11, right at the foot of the trade center towers. It is not blocks away but literally AT “Ground Zero” and part of it, not associated in anyone’s mind with the attack except as among its victims.
Yet the authority for rebuilding Ground Zero itself doesn’t want them building back their worship there (it’s a Greek Orthodox church, if that’s relevant but I don’t see how.) This underlines btw that the religion-sponsored community center at issue (we could call it the YMMA — like YMCA, only Muslim instead of Christian) some city blocks away and out of sight-line, isn’t considered part of Ground Zero either legally or logically, any more than the neighboring strip and peep clubs, bars and such.
In other words, the GZ authority has no authority over IT and furthermore, that authority never meant to remake the whole lower end of Manhattan as a sacred shrine. In fact, it isn’t even making GZ itself a place of worship, unless you consider worship of commerce a religion (now we may be getting somewhere!)
Curiouser and curiouser.
So that’s a couple of hints that anti-Islam politics and religion might once again turn out to be all about the money. Hmmm, that reminds me:
That was last fall’s lovely back-to-school lesson from my hometown. Now please note this is the same Florida city — a university town, shame on them! — and the same pastor of the same “Dove Outreach” church, where the nationally-reported “International Burn a Quran” event is upcoming this September 11.
In this CNN story, the Gainesville church hosting a counter-event for actual peace and ecumenical understanding is my own childhood church, Trinity United Methodist.
Covert Operations:
The billionaire brothers who are waging a [for-profit] war against Obama
by Jane Mayer
BREAKING NEWS Cash really IS King and we’re all just serfs now. Health care corporate sleaze buys (for $50 million) the right to represent himself and his own interests directly, cutting out journalism, party and the people altogether — except “people” he already owns and therefore commands.
UPDATE:
And BP just bought the “research” they needed to tell us all to calm down.
And FOX is buying the mantle of the civil rights movement for Glenn Beck, literally as “King.” Meanwhile the Koch brothers have used their billions to create a Tea Party Frankenstein in their own immoral image:
The language of the American founders contains not one word about sensitivity. . .
We can truly secure ourselves against persecution only by binding ourselves against the privilege of being persecutors.
. . . did Paine and others mean to extend such toleration to Muslims? They did, and they said they did. The question was openly debated whether religious liberty ought to be extended to such outliers as Catholics, Muslims and Jews. . .
. . . in the same debate, David Caldwell objected that the American Constitution would allow a toleration so sweeping “there was an invitation for Jews, and Pagans of every kind, to come among us”; and he ended by suggesting “those gentlemen who formed this Constitution, should not have given this invitation to Jews and Heathens.”
The answer this time came from Samuel Spencer. No religious test, argued Spencer, could possibly exclude the most rightly feared enemies of faith, namely secret unbelievers, who are willing hypocritically to profess a belief they do not hold.
. . .American Christians in 2010 (if they are white) cannot easily call on memories of persecution to support a commitment to toleration. Even Catholics, who now have six judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Jews, who have three judges, may find that such fears hardly seem to apply in America. . . .we all turn unimaginative — and therefore morally lazy — when the tracks of a prejudice favor our fortunes for long enough.
[...] How the Mosque Fearmongering Got Going [...]