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motherjones:

“Hate Comes to Orange County”

The next time someone complains to you about “union thugs,” show them this. It kind of puts the lie to the idea that there’s any moral equivalency between progressive demonstrators and angry, hateful right-wingers.

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This sickens me. Knowing the context of it does not make me feel any less sick. But the context is worth knowing. Here, from the Orange County Register, is why these fine patriots think they’re defending freedom by shrieking their bigotry at little kids:

Many in the crowd outside the event said they were concerned about past anti-American statements by the event’s two keynote speakers, Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali. Wahhaj is an imam at a mosque in Brooklyn. A U.S. attorney named him and 169 others as co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wahhaj was never charged and has denied involvement.

Malik Ali is a Bay Area Islamic activist who spoke at “Israeli Apartheid Week” at UC Irvine in 2010. There he said he supports Hezbollah, which the CIA labels a terrorist group.

Therefore, “one nation under God! Not Allah!”

Um, yeah, go back to Europe — twelfth-century Europe.

 - David Quigg, 3/3/11

UPDATE (3/3/11, 7:04 pm): The end of this post never felt right to me. I know I was joking. Joking bitterly, granted. But joking. Still, this is a blog. Strangers will read it. They may take me literally. So while I’m not going to cover up that I wrote what I wrote, I’ll sleep better if I make it clear that any kind of “Go back to (insert non-U.S. locale here)!” is toxic to what I treasure about America. So stick around, you screaming bullies. This land is made for you and me.

(this post was reblogged from motherjones)
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Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting. The genius of the American experiment in religious liberty is precisely this long-term confidence that equal rights for all religious groups builds the loyalty every democratic society needs. Certainly American Catholics learned that lesson long ago.

John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby, Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (via nybooks)

I have yet to read the full piece that this excerpt links to. The excerpt itself is sensible and worthwhile, so I’m reblogging it. It reminds me of a post I wrote in ‘08 for Huffington Post about the anti-Catholic smears Al Smith endured when he ran for president in the 1920s. I’d been ignorant of that.

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UPDATE: 

Now that I’ve read what McGreevy and Appleby wrote, I want to call attention to another passage from their post: “For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent ‘religious other.’ Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.”

They go on to acknowledge that “historical comparisons are bound to be inexact.” Even so, their rundown of the American Catholic experience is helpful. They do leave out Al Smith, though. So here, for whatever it might be worth, is a link to my aforementioned 10/19/08 HuffPost, “A Cell Phone Call During Mass (Remembering the Anti-Catholic Smears of the 1928 Election).” (I just re-read it. Parts of it make me cringe. Style stuff. Not substance. Let’s just say that it was written at a certain historical moment that is not now. I’m tempted to delete the link, but the stuff I quote from NYT stories in 1928 is worth knowing about. For example, one Alabama senator refused to vote for his fellow Democrat because Smith’s Catholicism supposedly would drive him to use the presidency to annex Mexico. Because Mexico has lots of Catholics, see? And then pretty soon the Protestants are outnumbered and America is ruined. “Smith!!!!” Crazy, bigoted stuff.)

(this post was reblogged from nybooks)