{"id":4230,"date":"2010-08-01T09:21:10","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T16:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4230"},"modified":"2010-08-03T10:44:29","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T17:44:29","slug":"mosquegate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4230","title":{"rendered":"Mosquegate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Went out to dinner with our RRFs (Rich Republican Friends) the other night.\u00a0 They, as always, were up to date on Fox News talking points, which they used to guide what had been a sociable discussion toward the Muslim Threat.\u00a0 Why, did we know there are Muslims in Detroit, Muslims with mosques?\u00a0 Mosques with minarets and loudspeakers, loudly playing the muezzins’ calls to prayer five times a day?\u00a0 Muslims with mosques who want to impose Sharia Law on their fellow Detroiters, just as they’ve done to Christians in the UK and Europe?<\/p>\n

All this by way of getting to their main point, which was opposition to the building of a new mosque in New York City, the one misleadingly called the “Ground Zero mosque” and, while we’re at it, the construction of any additional mosques anywhere within the United States of America.\u00a0 Oh, and let’s outlaw PDI — Public Displays of Islam — too: veils, burqas, calls to prayer.\u00a0 We will not submit to Sharia!<\/p>\n

I swear, if they’d kept going, pretty soon we’d have been hearing about Muslims poisoning wells, spreading plague, and grinding up the bones of Christian babies to make tabouli.<\/p>\n

But I interrupted, reminding my RRFs that the First Amendment prohibits congress from making laws restricting the free exercise of religion.*<\/strong> Americans can’t tell other Americans they can’t build churches or that they can’t worship in accordance with their religion’s dictates.\u00a0 Unless, of course, said religion involves forced marriage between 80-year-old bigamists and 14-year-old girls . . . oh, wait.<\/p>\n

But my RRFs were way ahead of me.\u00a0 Fox & Friends had prepared them for this argument.\u00a0 The First Amendment doesn’t apply, you see,\u00a0 because Islam is a cult, not a religion.<\/p>\n

Would there have been any point in citing the slippery slope?\u00a0 That if you run the Muslims out of town, you open the door to those who’d like to round up the Jews?\u00a0 That if you say Islam isn’t a religion, you open the door to those who say the founding fathers never intended blacks to be counted as “natural born citizens”?<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 There wouldn’t have been any point.\u00a0 I’m ashamed for my RRFs.\u00a0 They’ve abandoned the values and morals they were raised with.\u00a0 What part of “illegal” don’t they understand?\u00a0 Any part that gets between them and their (Christian) God-given right to take legal protections away from people they disapprove of.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong> “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Update (8\/2\/10):<\/em><\/span> I’m being far too hard on my RRFs, Donna says, and she’s right.\u00a0 They are friends, after all, and who isn’t guilty of prejudice from time to time?\u00a0 I certainly am.\u00a0 I’ll cheerfully admit that I’ve always thought Mormons are creepy . . . but more to the point, that I share my friends’ distrust of Muslims and don’t want to see women wearing veils\u00a0 or men kneeling in prayer on American streets . . . so I know where they’re coming from.\u00a0 But damn it, two wrongs don’t make a right, and it was not Islam that attacked this country on 9\/11.\u00a0 It was Al Qaeda, and where the hell is Osama bin Laden’s head?\u00a0 It should have been severed from his body and displayed on a pike in front of the White House nine years ago!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Went out to dinner with our RRFs (Rich Republican Friends) the other night.\u00a0 They, as always, were up to date on Fox News talking points, which they used to guide what had been a sociable discussion toward the Muslim Threat.\u00a0 Why, did we know there are Muslims in Detroit, Muslims with mosques?\u00a0 Mosques with minarets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,16,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-current-events","category-media","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4230"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4248,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions\/4248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}