In support of the American Muslim community

Sometimes with all that is happening in the world, and with all the racial and religious strife that appears to be happening in the US, we forget who we are and what our core principles are suppose to be.

I just read an article about a group of so called 'Christians', wearing 'F&* Islam' T-shirts and open carrying weapons, marching in front of a Mosque in Phoenix Arizona.  The purpose was obviously to both intimidate the worshipers with the weapons, and denigrate their beliefs.

Seriously? In 21st Century America, we have people using the same tactics against other Americans that our parents and grandparents fought a war to stop. This is the same kind of obscene action taken against Jews before Kristallnacht in pre WW2 Germany. Have we learned nothing from the holocaust?Did we not learn from our own internment camps during that same period?

Just as importantly, have we forgotten who we are and what our country is supposed to stand for?
For all of our internal strife, our struggle against racism, our questioning the meaning civil equality, we have always considered ourselves to be the beacon of freedom, the light of acceptance and religious freedom to the rest of the world.

American Muslims are exactly that: AMERICAN as well as Muslim. It is both disrespectful to that community and to all other religious communities to allow the actions of radicals in other parts of the world to determine how we treat our own people.

To the American Muslim community: You are our brothers and sisters. You are our co workers, fellow taxpayers, our doctors, lawyers, builders, teachers, and students. You are welcome and your beliefs are as American as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the other wonderful variations of spirituality in our country.

There are many of us out there who will NOT allow the Nazis to rise again and make any group a scapegoat for their own failures.

Never Again

Gays vs the Religious Right

My first gut feeling was to say that I really didn't understand why religion has such enmity towards gay people. So I took a look at what I knew about the history of 'Gay Liberation' and came to the following conclusions:

After the event known as the 'Stonewall Riot' in 1969, Gay people, sick of marginalized based on what they considered to be a neutral, if not benevolent difference from the rest of society, attempted to put themselves more into the public eye.

From the start, the Gay liberation movement appeared to be confrontational. While most minority communities had family, church, and schools to give them emotional support, the Gay community had none of these, and soon appeared to develop a bitter, 'in your face' attitude towards towards those parts of society that just wanted them to go away and return to the 'closet'.

As the political marches commemorating Stonewall evolved into Gay Pride marches, the gay community embraced the sub communities that made up its constituency, and the visible attributes such as leather and drag that made up part of the gay subculture, became more and more visible in the Pride marches.

This rankled the Evangelical and Conservative Christian communities, who considered people to be essentially evil, needing redemption by accepting Christianity. Sex itself was considered evil, tempered only by the 'sacrament' of marriage which made it tolerable in that it procreated the race  and was controlled by religious leaders. Seeing the defiant lack of guilt displayed by people in the Pride parades about their sexuality, the religious people started to see this 'perversion' as an affront to their beliefs and as a threat to their authority.

In October of 1979,  10 years after the Stonewall, upward of 75,000 Gay and Lesbian people marched on Washington to demand equality before the law.

A second march in 1987, done in part to protest the Reagan Administration refusing to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, and the Supreme Court's Bowers vs Hardwick decision which effectively said that gay sex could be made illegal by the states, brought 200,000 gay people to Washington.

The country at this point had become more conservative, and religious conservatives had a much stronger voice in government.  As gay people became more and more visible, public figures started to 'come out of the closet', and the media presentation of gays became more positive, the religious right realized that they needed to take some kind of action to stem the 'perverts' from  achieving social parity with the rest of society.

So came the religiously influenced national anti gay legislation of the 1990s, such as DADT(1993) ,State bans on SSM, and DOMA (1996). In order to combat these legal restrictions on their lives, Gay organizations opted to try and increase their presence in the media, showing the American public that they were not too different than anyone else, and the laws were discriminatory.

This started the cycle which is apparently still escalating. The more visible and accepted Gays have become, the more strident and vitriolic the religious right has become in trying to suppress the trend. This has caused the the Gay community to try and further increase their visibility and integration into American Culture. Over time DADT and DOM have both been rescinded, a move that was felt as a serious blow by the religious conservatives.

The final straw was Same Sex Marriage. As I mentioned earlier, Christians appear to believe that Sex in general is evil, unless strictly controlled by the churches. As the discord between the two communities has grown, modern religious conservatives see national SSM as the final nail in the coffin of what has been termed the 'culture' war. They will have lost control over the sexual mores of American society.

The hysteria felt by these conservative religious movements has reached unprecedented heights, everything from

• states vowing to put state constitutions above the federal constitution:
• a flurry of 'religious freedom' laws whose sole purpose is to legitimize discrimination against the Gay community
• forecasts of armed rebellion
• forecasts of divine retribution in the form of fireballs from space, floods and natural disasters if the supreme court rules in favor of the Gay community in the marriage issue.

I realize there is some bias in the presentation above. I am on the side of the Gay community since as an American Jew, I believe that every American is entitled to the same civil rights as every other, and that religious freedom needs to stop at my front door.

I think perhaps, the American Evangelical community are  spiritual heirs of the Puritans; folks who came to this country when English law prevented them from discriminating against people outside their sect. They need to get used to the idea that they are no longer the arbiters of American culture. We have become more of a diverse society, and as long as there is no practical harm or violence resulting from somebody's lifestyle, religious folk need to tend their own garden, practice their beliefs as applied to themselves and their families, and leave non believers in peace.

I found an article that articulates this much better than I do :confusing loss of power with loss of religious freedom