Monrovia, California
April 9, 2018
Let's talk about religion. It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam. This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban. Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down. So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later. And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years.
April 9, 2018
Let's talk about religion. It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam. This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban. Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down. So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later. And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years.
The result of all this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim-targeting activity from this administration and from previous ones, going back at least to 9/11, has been to increase the sympathy of liberals toward Islam, a religion that hardly got a second look a generation ago in this country, before the Ayatollah, unless you were Jewish and/or concerned about Israel. The press and the government, prior to the takeover of the executive branch by its current gang of thugs, were careful not to blur the lines of distinction between what they characterized as regular harmless Islam and and radical militant Kill-The-Infidel Islam. Adherents to the latter version are now called Islamists, to distinguish them from everyday Muslims. And the clergy and experts in the religion--the ones who get interviewed on CNN--are always quick to point out that Islam is essentially a religion of peace, and that the bad-guy suicide bombers and ISIS types don't represent the vast majority of quiet, assiduous believers in this essentially misogynistic and backward faith.
As so often happens, civil libertarians have a tendency to choose strange bedfellows in the name of protecting the Bill of Rights. It's one reason I've never succumbed to the ceaseless junk mail requests of the ACLU to join its ranks. Not that I'm opposed to the Bill of Rights generally. I like the freedom of press and speech and assembly parts, in particular, as well as the amendments that protect the accused in criminal actions. The Second Amendment I would gladly shitcan, since no one seems to know where to draw the line there, although plain common sense, if it were applied, would tell you that it has outlived its original intended usefulness. That view recently got a respectable airing by retired Justice John Paul Stevens. But that's a subject for another rant. It's freedom of religion that concerns me here. And again, it is the application of common sense that seems to be singularly lacking in the construction of this portion of the First Amendment. Freedom of religion, I believe, was never intended to be an impediment to the orderly conduct of national affairs. If a conscientious objector refuses to be inducted into the military in time of war, then the government has a right to sanction that person in some way. Not severely, but rationally. I myself was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, and, but for the intervening draft lottery that mooted the point for me, would have been classified 1-O, which would have meant that I could have been drafted and assigned to a nonmilitary place, such as a mental hospital, where I ended up working anyway. My personal conscientious objection to that war wasn't based on any deeply held conviction that war in general is immoral or unsupportable, although I had to tell the draft board that it was. Instead it was based on my private conviction that the U.S. had no business doing battle with the communist government of North Vietnam. And look how it all played out. Well, I digress.
Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted. To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view. A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders. If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well. If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem. Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway. Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time. The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant. Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe. I call that a lack of progress.
By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is. The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it. Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant. But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.
Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie. The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are. The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric. And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth. That's spokesmen, not spokespersons. And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.
To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone. Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope. Where might it end? Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them? This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.
But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant. My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity? Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers. But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect? When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD. It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism. It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want. Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe. It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place. Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.
To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."
Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted. To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view. A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders. If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well. If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem. Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway. Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time. The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant. Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe. I call that a lack of progress.
By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is. The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it. Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant. But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.
Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie. The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are. The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric. And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth. That's spokesmen, not spokespersons. And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.
To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone. Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope. Where might it end? Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them? This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.
But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant. My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity? Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers. But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect? When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD. It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism. It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want. Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe. It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place. Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.
To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."
