Any Koran burnings in your area? Remember that when you denigrate the religions and customs of immigrant groups, you help them assimilate more quickly.
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by DougJ| 107 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Any Koran burnings in your area? Remember that when you denigrate the religions and customs of immigrant groups, you help them assimilate more quickly.
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Michael D.
My partner and I are looking for one in Atlanta. We plan to buy a bunch of Bibles to burn.
mistersnrub
Bloomberg is a “Judenrat” according to Mark Williams.
Fucking Despicable.
dmsilev
Adventures in moving, AT&T edition: “Sorry sir, we can’t tell you when your phone and Internet will start working. It’s in the computer, and at some point the computer will flip a switch and things will work. But we don’t know when. Tonight, we think.”
Who is running this company, Skynet?
dms
Mnemosyne
The oh-so-lovely mosque protests in Temecula were in my general area of Southern California. Fortunately, the protest was a bust since local churches got together and out-protested the protesters.
Brachiator
I’m hoping that someone will post a recipe for Barbecued Koran with a side of shredded Constitution.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
You mean like when the Spanish helped the Jews assimilate?
Silver
I saw a Sikh walking today and called him a muslim nigger.
The first time in my life I felt like a real American…
Linda Featheringill
@Mnemosyne:
Cool!
Politically Lost
I’ve got a copy of the Pastafarian Bible, and am a strict adherent.
I believe there are a couple of splinter groups that are agitating for being the one true Flying Spaghetti Monster religion such as the First Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the New Reformation of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I think it’s time for some sect cleansing in the FSM world. We’ll drown all the other adherents in a beer volcano just as the prophesy said we should.
According to Beer Advocate, my neighborhood brewpub has the second best beer in the world.
http://beeradvocate.com/lists/top
Russian River Brewing would be a fitting place to make the appropriate sacrifice. I’ll need a little help constructing the volcano though.
Since Russian River brewing is considered sacred beer ground there will be opposition by those who don’t consider the FSM to be the one true God. They will be punished too.
MattR
I missed out on attending the Ground Zero of “Ground Zero Mosque” protests yesterday, but parking anywhere in the WTC/Wall St area is way too much of a pain. Unfortunately, the Staten Island ferry made it very convenient for that whole group of protesters. I did hear a report on WCBS am radio as I was trying to get a traffic update. If you listen to the “man on the street” interviews it seemed obvious that the station had trouble finding a coherent, unbigoted anti-mosque representative The pro-mosque guy made the reasonable point that this was essentially the 92nd St Y being run by Muslims. The anti-mosque guy was a firefighter who was upset that people who had lost loved ones and had not found any remains would come to this site and be subjected to all this hate (what hate exactly other than the protesters, I am not sure). Not a great argument, but better than the “MUSLIMS=EVIL” that I am sure most of the protesters were spewing.
JGabriel
This is interesting: Naomi Wolf reports that banks are turning identity theft into profit centers, and is suing WaMu / Morgan Chase for failing to safeguard her funds.
Apparently the banks stonewall after hearing about a fraud, demanding that you keep your accounts open while they “investigate”. And they continue to charge your accounts any fees and penalties associated with the fraudulent activity. Once 6 months have gone by, they tell you they’re no longer responsible for the lost funds because you waited too long, and stick you with the fraudulent losses while keeping for themselves the thousands of dollars in fees and penalties.
The Smoking Gun has Wolf’s legal complaint online.
.
Brachiator
As an aside, there is a very moving article in the NYT about the Green Guide (The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All). While the average white person would be concerned with where he might be able to find a good meal and a good night’s sleep, and which might be the safer neighborhoods, a black traveler would have to be concerned with something far more basic: where he or she might be welcomed, or where he or she might be turned away simply because of bigotry.
Coming around to current events again, one of the things that most appalls is the audacity of bigotry, the despicable insistence that Muslim Americans are not welcome in their own fucking homeland.
Just Some Fuckhead
There’s a Pakistani that runs the local convenience store where I buy cigarettes. I bought a bag of pork rinds from him and ate them right there in front of him, looking him dead in the eye as I chewed slowly and deliberately. You don’t fuck with this American.
MattR
@Just Some Fuckhead: I hope he thanked you afterwards for helping him to become a real American.
WereBear
@dmsilev: Some of the worst hours of my work life, ever (and I was a teenaged server in Florida, land of the quarter tip) was dealing with AT&T. You can’t even get them to help you unless you learn all the arcane things they call stuff:
Me: I’d like a statement of our current balance due, please.
Nice AT&T person: A what?
Repeat 18 times.
Nice AT&T person: Oh, you want a biggleore.
Me: Yes, please.
In pet rescue news, I’m a warning you: don’t click on this unless you want to tear up; first from horror, then from happiness.
There will be a book about him in a few months!
This story reminds me of a favorite book of my childhood, Beautiful Joe, which I found out later was the Black Beauty of Canada.
Linda Featheringill
“In response to the International Burn a Quran Day event taking place in the Dove World Outreach Center on Sept. 11, the Book of Signs Foundation is distributing 50 free Qurans for every Quran burned.”
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100819006543/en
And you can order a Koran [by whatever spelling] at
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100819006543/en
Lolis
Ha! My Mormon aunt’s takeaway from the LBJ museum was that blacks were treated so badly during the Civil Rights era because they “refused to assimilate.” I’m not sure how she thinks trying to gain your voting rights and other civil liberties is a failure to assimilate. Btw, this woman is a retired teacher.
stuckinred
About 3 months ago I was excited to find that the National Guard unit that I served half of my tour in Vietnam had established a website. I sent them a bunch of pictures and documents that I had and they put them up on their site. For the last couple of weeks they have started sending all these smart ass “you decide” emails about Obama being a Muslim. Today I get one with this bullshit about why he travels without Michelle when he visits Muslim nations. The story is from fucking asshole called “Dr Jim Murk” . His “doctorate is from Louisiana Baptist University
.
I sent back an email noting that he also went to Bob Jones University, and institution that considers Catholics to be part of a devil religion. Most of the dudes in this outfit are Italians from Providence, I told them they might be next.
soonergrunt
@Lolis: Sometimes, it is an act of love to look someone you care about in the eye, take them by the hand, and say, in a low even voice, “I love you, and I treasure you, so it hurts to say this, but that is the dumbest damn thing I’ve heard in quite a while, and you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that, let alone saying it.”
And then you hug them close and tell them “I still love you, though.”
soonergrunt
@stuckinred: Was it the unit itself, or the veterans’ group that did this?
El Cid
Watch completely rational, not-at-all anti-Arab & anti-Persian racist, not-at-all Muslim-hating not-at-all propagandist warmonger Cliff May exchange pleasantries with Glenn Greenwald on Dylan Ratigan’s show.
demo woman
Since this is an open thread, how likely is today’s ruling on blocking federal funding on embryonic stem cell research, will stand.
Southern Beale
Koran burnings? Nope but Nashville has had lots of other vandalism. See here and here.
However, today construction has begun on the Murfreesboro Islamic Center … I hope there will not be any future vandalism at this site.
Violet
I’m concerned that all this attention on Muslins is taking attention away from the real threat to America: illegal immigrants. So many people to hate, so little time.
beltane
I’m so sick of all the hate in this country. What is wrong with these people. OT, but a kid from my son’s high school just got killed in Afghanistan. http://caledonianrecord.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=50561 This will hit hard. It is a very small town and the young man was a popular basketball player.
What is wrong with our country.
MikeJ
@Lolis: What does she expect? They didn’t even have souls until what, 1980 or so?
PaulW
As a Unitarian and a librarian I cannot condone any book burning.
Unless it’s Ayn Rand.
El Tiburon
@demo woman:
Yes open, but not open to you kind of people. Someone call the grammar police and lock this person up.
stuckinred
@soonergrunt: It’s a listserv from the vets group. The unit was deactivated upon return from the Nam.
http://107thsignalcompany.com/
beltane
@PaulW: Ayn Rand’s books should be composted, not burnt. She would hate the thought of her books being put to use for something as benevolent as organic gardening.
burnspbesq
@JGabriel:
I’d suggest that you wait for discovery to be completed before jumping to any conclusions. There’s something about the narrative in the complaint that just sort of hangs right on the edge of being completely implausible. Among other things I’m curious about is the allegation that her ATM cared is believed to have been stolen by the same person who “fraudultently” accessed her account. That sounds like a thinly veiled story of an ugly breakup.
And as a general matter, that’s not a plaintiff that I view as a paragon of credibility.
General Stuck
Hummingbird
MattR
@Violet:
And bears. Don’t forget about the grave threat posed by those vicious killing machines.
@demo woman: I am not so sure how I feel about it. I obviously support stem cell research, but at the same time it does seem like the NIH was making an end run around the law (and skirting the intent of Congress)
PaulW
@Violet:
I’m concerned that all this attention on illegal immigrants is taking attention away from the real threat to America: poor people who can’t pay off their mortgages.
The other real threat to America: BULLETPROOF BEARS.
EDIT: I just missed MattR’s post. Apologies.
MobiusKlein
Here’s my secret plan – become the Koran supplier for such folks, but substitute the Bible translated into Arabic for the text.
MikeJ
@MattR: I don’t care for Sullivan either but must every thread devolve into bashing him?
MattR
@PaulW: But you provided a cool link. I wonder how loing before we see that on the Colbert Report.
@MikeJ: This took me a few seconds longer than it should have.
JGabriel
@demo woman:
It’s a temporary injunction. That said, the judge wouldn’t have granted it if he didn’t think the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in his court. Whether it holds up on appeal will depend in part on Kennedy’s feelings regarding stem cell research, and in part on how SCOTUS feels about an executive order overriding, if not the letter, then potentially the intent of, the 90’s law banning the use of federal funds to harvest embryonic stem cells.
NIH’s argument appears to be that as long as they’re not funding the harvesting, they’re free to fund the research.
Obama could probably get a bill through Congress to overide the decision, if it goes against him. It’s not an issue where GOP attitudes are monolithically against it, and Congress voted twice to overturn the law under Bush, who vetoed them both times.
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Violet
@MattR: @PaulW:
Great minds! I love that link to the bullet-proof bear. Colbert bait!
salacious crumb
This whole controversy against the mosque has been started by illegal Mexican immigrants…They instigated Koran burning sessions while completing their mission of forcing us to speak Spanish and taking away our much desired and in demand lettuce picking and toilet cleaning jobs. See how the heat against illegal immigrants has been taken off them.
Now Jan Brewer will need to find a way to connect Prophet Muhammad and illegal Mexicans to put the spotlight back on the illegals and thus win reelection.
Frank
@MattR:
I wish the reporter had followed up with another question. What does this anti-mosque guy in NY feel about the mosques that are being built in KY, TN and CA? Locals in each place are trying to stop them from being built. Is the anti-mosque guy against these as well or just the one in NY?
jl
Cato Institute purges its ‘liberaltarians’ Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson. I didn’t follow the thinktank biz enough to remember reading anything by them. But I do remember reading about the Cato ‘liberaltarian’ outreach effort, which made me take them a little more seriously as an intellectually independent organization. But, then, I am a true sucker.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2010/08/23/a-purge-at-the-cato-institute.aspx
Found via Brad DeLong’s blog.
beltane
@salacious crumb: That’s where the terror babies enter the picture. Illegal Mexican immigrants having babies in the USA so they can receive Muslim indoctrination at the Ground Zero mosque and grow up to take away our freedoms.
Linda Featheringill
@Southern Beale:
Hooray for Murfreesboro!
But isn’t that kind of close to groud zero? [note spelling and blame John]
JGabriel
@burnspbesq: The merits of Wolf’s suit is one issue; the matter of banks turning id theft into a profit center is another.
I have doubt too over whether Wolf can prevail in her case, but she does seem to have the goods on WaMu in terms of emails and other documents showing that stonewalling to collect fees, and avoid liability, were SOP in id theft cases.
As you correctly caution, though, we won’t know for sure until those documents come out in discovery.
.
Comrade Dread
I burned a few outside of my local 7-11. The secret Mooslims inside kept telling me that they were Indian, but they couldn’t answer me when I demanded to know where their headdresses and tomahawks were.
Stoopid Mooslims… think I’ve never seen a Western movie before.
salacious crumb
@beltane: ok fair enough but we still need to find a way to connect that to Prophet Muhammad, black men and white women.
Then we can Glenn Beck and Jan Brewer
Violet
@salacious crumb:
This is so easy to do. Mexicans and Muslins are both brown, so you can’t them apart. Sekrit terrist Muslins can sneak across our porous, unprotected-by-Obama borders and bring the Arabic Muslin terror to our very doorstep right here in the Heartland! ! ! To Protect Murka we must close our borders so both illegals and terrists can’t sneak in and Destroy America.
General Stuck
The hate has always been in this country, and while we have, it seems, more than our fair share, hate is a global phenom. Always has been. I am going to view what we see now in that context, and that it isn’t uncontested as it once was, when lynching blacks in the south was pretty much standard fair, and then there was institutionalized slavery before that.
It is a deep seated infection in this country, though maybe less than in the past, and now more cloaked in false memes of one kind or another to keep up appearance of being non hate. That used to be not the case.
So all this nasty bullshit based of fear and nativism needs to come out into the sunlight to be disinfected, not so much for the mouth breathing neanderthal class that has always existed and likely always will, but for the remnants of fear and nativism that still circulates in the national bloodstream of those on a fence, that still entertain crazy conspiracy notions about someone out to get them that don’t look like them, or maybe don’t believe quite like them.
Latent xenophobia that lingers on in normally non hateful Americans who I believe are a large majority in this country. They need to see this shit in the raw, and then when those long held and suppressed fear demons come out of the closet, they at least have the opportunity to expunge them. Many won’t, but many may well.
Violet
@salacious crumb:
Easy peasy: Black and brown people will gang up on Real Americans and bring their diseases and drugs and foreign religions and force themselves on our white women.
meh
I sent john a link earlier, but the douche doing the koran burning in Tampa got arrested for kiddie porn – that would be the Pastor. Of course he did.
demo woman
@El Tiburon: You’re right.
@JGabriel: The republicans as a rule filibuster so it’s doubtful that the law will change. Is it possible that embryos could gain rights under the Constitution?
salacious crumb
@Violet: your reasoning is too easy for a deep connection thinker like Glenn Beck. He would be insulted that we think he will just buy this simplistic assessment. It has to be more complicated.
Still you should look for a job with Jan Brewer,,,Im sure her office needs all the help (and connections) they can get.
Bill Murray
While we’re on Koran burning and other sundry assaults on Mussleman, let’s visit 1970s London and the great Jam song Down in the Tube Station at Midnight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9gX26AdFLo&feature=related
soonergrunt
@stuckinred: Not a lot you can do about that, except start asking them if they feel better treating people like their grandparents were treated.
I had to deliver a facebook beating on the muslim community center issue.
JGabriel
demo woman:
Heh. That would require the same people who are arguing against birthright citizenship to argue instead that citizenship begins at conception.
Also, no. I can’t see two thirds of the states ratifying a such an amendment to the constitution.
.
NobodySpecial
I’m still waiting for the signs in shops: No Muslims Need Apply.
stuckinred
@soonergrunt: I know, or just ask them to take me off the list. I don’t know what I expected, the dude running the site is the VFW commander at their post. When I talked to him he sounded like such a good dude, he and his wife went back to the Nam and adopted a child. shit
Chad N Freude
@JGabriel: That’s funny, but embryonic rights need not be citizenship rights.
WereBear
@stuckinred: No one is all good, or all bad. Usually.
So good for him for the child rescue… and maybe he’ll figure it out about this prejudice thing.
You’re right; that doesn’t make sense.
demo woman
@JGabriel: Some of the Roberts Court rulings have been so extreme that I feared the ruling might lead to a debate about when life begins.
Thanks.
JGabriel
@Chad N Freude: Buzzkill.
.
soonergrunt
@stuckinred:
Start replying in the listserv that you don’t appreciate the racist shit, and if you wanted to join a bunch of winger racist whackjobs, you’d have joined the American Legion instead of the VFW. See if anybody joins you.
Suffern ACE
Is it just me, or did “assimilation” as a social goal for the left go out the door in the early 1990s to be replaced multi-culturalism? Wasn’t that what the switch from the “great books” to the “new canon” supposed to support? How did we get back here again?
Violet
@salacious crumb:
Oh, no! I made it too easy? Okay…let me try again, in true Glenn Beck style. (You’ll have to imagine the chalkboard.):
Mohammad spoke Arabic, which is a foreign language, and not a language used in the Bible. It came much later than the True Biblical Languages, like Roman, and English and MelGibsonic.
The Arabs stole the idea of numbers from the Romans, and created their own set of numerals. Because they were traders, they forced their trading partners to use their numerals, just like they’ll force us all to start speaking Arabic if we let them! You’ll notice that the true Biblical numbers are the Roman numbers.
But back to Mohammad, who went around forcing his numbers on everyone, just like African Americans today are forcing us all to learn their hippy-hoppy and rap. America is open to everyone, but some things just aren’t right and that loud rappy stuff is one of those things that is really unAmerican.
Mohammad, and his followers the Muslins, and blacks here in America have that in common: they like to force their culture on us. So it’s no surprise that so many African Americans are Muslin. And the Mexicans with their Spanish are also part of the group that forces their culture on us.
So all these groups are forcing their culture on us and if we’re not careful they’ll be taking over our country. We’ve got to Stand Up for America and Protect Our Freedoms, or we’ll lose The American Way of Life.
UGH. I’m making myself ill with all this crap. It’s a little scary how easy it is.
Chad N Freude
@JGabriel: What can I say? It’s my destiny.
Litlebritdifrnt
You know something happened today that made me put this entire mosque thing into perspective. What was that you ask? Cesar Laurean was found guilty of the murder of Maria Lauterbach. Other than my local newspapers website I saw nothing, not on the web, not on TV, my local am radio station reported that the jury was still out when they had come back with a verdict a hour and a half prior.
I can remember when my town was under seige because of this case. Where you could not move for news satellite trucks clogging the parking lot of the Sheriff’s Department, when Greta was reporting live from down here, when Mark Furhman was pissing off the locals cause they did not treat him with the proper deference.
We had every damn alphabet news station permanently camped out in our city for weeks and today the verdict came out and nothing. Not a peep.
The not mosque at not ground zero is this month’s Lauterbach murder.
damn good mr. jam
Whenever I visit my girlfriend, I drive past the Islamic Center in DC. I’ve been afraid of explosions.
HY
And also the religions and customs of non-immigrant people, says this Muslim Daughter of the American Revolution (OK, I haven’t actually applied for membership but I have the original officer’s commission of my multiple-times-grandfather, signed by J Hancock himself, so I guess I could.)
Chad N Freude
@Violet: You make some good points. I will no longer use terrorist numerals.
Platonicspoof
No, but I’m sure as hell looking for a German language version of the Bible to burn.
To #51:
(Also apparently faked, the story that pastor Terry Jones fucks baby goats.)
MikeJ
@meh: No he didn’t. LGF shot it down yesterday or day before.
salacious crumb
@Violet: what you outlined is too complicated for my conservative one track mind. I previous your previous simplistic assessment.
still.. good job!
PurpleGirl
@Mnemosyne: That response from the locals was spectacular.
Cat Lady
Happy birthday to me.
Cat Lady +5
JGabriel
Suffern ACE:
It’s not just you, most conservatives think that too.
The left, or at least this liberal, never saw assimilation and respect for multi-culturalism as mutually exclusive concepts; a mosaic still holds its image despite the discreteness of its constituent colors.
.
Frank
@General Stuck:
Absolutely. They currently probably have way more hatred for Islam in Europe than here.
But what makes it so galling is our history. Our ancestors came from Europe. They were killed for their religious beliefs over there. As a result, many of them decided to come this country so they could continue with their religious beliefs without the government interfering. And now, some 250 years later, some people in both parties seem to be clueless about our own history and want to turn us into Europe a la 1760.
I guess New Gingrich said it best; “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero as long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Who in their right mind wants our country to compare itself to Saudi Arabia when it comes to religious freedom. Other than Newt Gingrich I guess…
Violet
@Chad N Freude:
Yep, we should all refrain from using Terrorist Numerals. They’re even teaching them to our children!
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I remember when she went missing and then was found and then he was found (in Mexico, right?). It was all over the news every single day. Interesting that no one cares now. I guess fear of The Other is more exciting than Blonde Girl’s Murderer Found Guilty.
Cacti
I saw a little brown kid walking through the neighborhood today. Since he didn’t look Mexican, I figured he was Muslin.
So I ran up to him and yelled “Fuck your Mosque Osama!” and spit in his face.
Just doing my part to help him assimilate.
Chad N Freude
@JGabriel: As is generally the case with politically loaded terms, these have been corrupted by the NeoCentrists (formerly the screaming radical right) to mean:
Assimilation= absorption into a Borg-like single organism of pure American Number Oneness, preferably with chemically lightened skin.
Multi-culturalism = Division into mutually exclusive ethnoreligious compartments whose function is to hate and scream at one another while not denying their rights to hate and scream at one another.
PurpleGirl
@MobiusKlein: I like how your mind works.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
Yeah, I still have severe reservations about the case. I am convinced that the wife (Christina Laurean) had something to do with it but she has got off scott free apparently and is merrily continuing her career in the Marine Corps. It is just amazing to me that as I said this city was literally under siege by press trucks for weeks and now absolutely nothing about the verdict. What we need to divert attention from the not ground zero not mosque is a missing blonde girl.
BTW can anyone explain to me why George Snuffleuppagus and GMA are apparently so fixated on that missing little boy in Oregon? I turn it on in the morning and George tells me earnestly “breaking news, the janitor that was on duty at the school and was unblocking a blocked toilet when Kyron went missing speaks out in an exclusive GMA interview” I mean every damn morning there is another story about that kid. How many children go missing in the US a year? And GMA has fixated on this one? Why?
stuckinred
@soonergrunt: Great call! Ya think I should post a picture of me from my VVAW days too?
Mnemosyne
@Frank:
It really points up the essential childishness of their argument: “If I can’t do anything I want wherever I want, then you can’t either! Nanny nanny boo boo!”
Mnemosyne
@Litlebritdifrnt:
They’ve fixated because it’s a (possible) evil stepmother story. The press lurves it when mothers kill their kids because it gives them so many opportunities to pontificate about the Breakdown of Society, and it’s even better when it’s a wicked stepmother.
MikeJ
Where is my firefox 4.0b4 I was promised today?
Litlebritdifrnt
@Mnemosyne:
Ooooh so that is what it is? We have all gone back to fairy tales? I personally take pride in the fact that I am an evil step mother (if you listen to my step-daughters that is),
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I keep waiting for the right Open Thread to post this in, and finally, I’ve just decided: What the hell. Time to bring the room down.
Three and a half years ago, a 10 year old Palestinian girl was shot and killed by Israeli forces. They initially tried to blame her for her own death, but last week, an Israeli civil court found that the state was to blame.
I happened to sort of know her father, as I had interviewed him for some articles I wrote about Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates, and her death was one of those that really hit me. Her exoneration (with a finger pointing at the real guilty party) came, well, as a relief I suppose. I hope it brings her family some small measure of peace.
I posted about it the day that the ruling came down, posting also the piece that her father ran in the Forward soon after she was killed: http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/abir-aramin-loss-and-justice/
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I dunno, I’ve quit watching the Today Show (which used to be my morning idiocy of choice). I used to turn it on and watch the first half hour for the newsiest news, but somewhere in the last month or so, I’ve just quit. Occasionally I turn it on at the top of the hour and pause it on the DVR and them FF to get to the news snippets, but mostly I’ve quit doing that. It’s kind of refreshing.
Roger Moore
@Chad N Freude:
Shouldn’t we just rename them “Freedom Numerals” instead?
batgirl
@Frank:
This is a pet peeve of mine about the story of American religious freedom and the Puritans. Yes, the Puritans came here so that they could freely practice their religion, enforced by their local governments and through taxes, and hate on all those that weren’t Puritans and kick them out.
So it seems we never learn. Because we always think we have the one true religion that everyone else must follow.
Roger Moore
@Frank:
Some of them did. Others of them came here not because they believed in religious freedom but because they wanted to be the ones in charge of enforcing the religious beliefs. The Puritans, for instance, were a bunch of religious zealots who wanted a place where they were free to enforce their own narrow views. Remember that Roger Williams only founded Rhode Island on the principle of religious freedom after he was run out of Massachusetts for advocating it there. Religious bigotry has at least as long a history in the USA as religious tolerance does.
Violet
We’re getting really close to requiring Muslims to wear crescents on their clothes:
Chad N Freude
@Violet: Yes. Then we can confine them to walled neighborhoods of their own, require that any new building to accommodate population growth be confined to those neighborhoods thus gradually eliminating mobility within the the neighborhoods (see Spain, 13-15th centuries), force them to work in factories turning out our war-making machines (i.e. defense weapons), and finally, if they continue to refuse to assimilate, deport them or gas them or behead them or something.
Is this a great country or what?
Suffern ACE
@batgirl: It comes from the way history was written at one time to explain why the North and South developed differently. New England, PA and MD founded by the Pious escaping persecution while the South was founded by people seeking profit. Hence the Civil War and different development is explained as inherent in the founding “character”. (As swell as it was as an explanation, it was a little, well, self-serving as far as explanations go). Kind of like tracing “tolerance” in NYC back to the Dutch founding, without noting that the Dutch were not always so tolerant in all their other colonies.
Chad N Freude
@Violet: Editing seems to be in full-blown FYWPUser mode, so I can’t ETA, but I m,ust add that that site you linked to is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in living memory. An American radio station giving a Nazi air time. Disgusting.
JGabriel
@Frank:
Which adds a whole dimension to the idea of starting a new life in this country: ZOMBIES!
.
Glen Tomkins
Way ahead of you
“…when you denigrate the religions and customs of immigrant groups, you help them assimilate more quickly.”
That’s why I never lose an opportunity to denigrate Bubba’s weird-ass religion, and all of his incomprehensible tastes, such as NASCAR. These people have to learn to at least fake it until they can make it as properly acculturated heirs of Western Civilization.
DougJ
@meh:
Can you send it to me too?
Chad N Freude
@DougJ: Apparently it’s false.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Frank:
There is nothing more American than persecuting a newly arrived religious minority. I can’t believe all of you people, insisting on special rights for Muslims. Why do you think that they are exempt from the same requirement to fight bigotry, hatred and discrimination?
The Catholics had to go through it. The Jews had to go through it. The Mormons had to go through it. Even the fucking Episcopalians had to go through it in some places.
Why are Muslims special? Shouldn’t we require them to assimilate just like everyone else did?
DougJ
@Chad N Freude:
Thanks
KSinMA
One of the baggers at my local grocery store is (i.e., looks) Indian or Pakistani. Today he was wearing a red dot between his eyebrows. Never saw him do that before. I wondered if today was a Hindu holiday– but then I realized he probably didn’t want people to think he was Muslim.
meh
Shit – that got me too. Fuck, my bad. Was just going to link that page
http://www.nbc.com/news/2010/08/06/pastor-terry-jones-arrested-for-child-pornography/
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Brachiator: Win.
DPirate
My muslim neighbor offered me supper again today, that he had cooked. I told him no, I wouldn’t eat with an evil fanatic bent on the destruction of my freedoms… Sure smelled good though!
asiangrrlMN
@Cat Lady: Happy birthday! Hope it was a good one.
@batgirl: Mine, too. The Puritans were some mean motherfuckers who wanted to be the tyrants. If there’s one thing we do well in this country–it’s try to hate on religious freedom for thee while practicing it for me.
@DPirate: Snort.
I had falafels today. Does that make me a secret infidel?