Freedom Of Religion
What’s become of that great American notion?
Just yesterday came the news that Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp, a GOP candidate for the state’s open governor’s seat, suggested that the state might consider seceding from the union over the new health care reform law. But not to be outdone, GOP state Sen. Ron Ramsey–one of Wamp’s primary challengers–has been caught on tape questioning whether Islam is a real religion.
As Talking POints Memo reports, the exchange occurred when Ramsey fielded a question about the “invasion” of Muslims at a July 14 campaign event in Hamilton, Tenn.. Ramsey’s response? “…I’ve been trying to learn about Sharia [Islamic] law. I’ve been trying to learn what it is — not good, if that’s what’s going on. You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult, whatever you want to call it. And we do protect our religions, but at the same time, this is something that we are going to have to face.”
Calling out the dogs in California:
It seems the anti-mosque protesters in California have torn a few pages from the Abu Ghraib field manual. Protesters of a planned mosque and Muslim community center in Riverside County, California are calling on locals to come to a rally outside an existing mosque with their pet dogs because, as the protest organizer says, Muslims “hate dogs.”
As the Valley News of Fallbrook reports, the leader of the anti-community center rally — who the paper does not name — has “been active with Republican and Tea Party functions” in the past, before recently distributing an email to area media outlets calling on those opposed to the construction of the Islamic Center in Temecula to come to a “one-hour ‘singing – praying – patriotic rally’” July 30 at the site of the town’s existing Islamic center, which local Muslims are trying to replace with new construction.
I completely agree with Doug Mataconis, who writes from the libertarian perspective, speaking of Wayne Allyn Root:
The attempt by Root, Palin, Gingrich, and other opponents of this project to call this a “Ground Zero” mosque are therefore a complete misrepresentation of the location of the project. A misrepresentation obviously intended to lead people to think that a mosque is being built on the location of the World Trade Center rather than being constructed inside an already-existing decades old building as part of a larger project that would be open to the public as a whole. For that reason alone, Root’s appeals to emotionalism and the supposed “atrocity” that this project represents should be rejected as silly and, quite frankly, dishonest. …
In the end, Root falls into the same anti-Muslim hole that Palin, Gingrich, and others have. All he’s really saying is that we can’t let them scary Muslims build what they want to in a building they own. While he doesn’t go as far as Gingrich and Palin in calling for government action to stop the project, he adopts the same attitude of religious intolerance and, for any libertarian, that’s just unacceptable.
Unacceptable for any decent human being, but especially any American who claims to believe in the principles on which the country was founded.
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