So the folks who are singing peace songs haven’t engaged with the parents. Have they engaged with anyone connected to the school?
This brings some white boomer energy that makes me itch. I think of my state’s educator protests, which draw multiracial, multigenerational throngs to the streets, staff and parents and families with skin in the game. And then there are the boomers standing in little groups on the sidelines singing the same songs they sang in the sixties, and honestly it feels self-indulgent and unconnected with what’s actually going on, like they didn’t even bother to talk to the protest organizers before deciding what they’d do.
Talk to the people with skin in the game, and if there are already leaders, follow their lead. It’s not hard!
These are the sorts of statements that are entirely unhelpful and which convince people that there is in fact some kind of double standard being applied.
In the article Velocity linked to, I saw nothing that wasn’t consistent with how I have personally witnessed Christian families treating their LGBTQ children and relatives. Public shaming? Check. Shunning and excommunication? Check. Attempts at conversion? Check. We know Christian terrorism is a problem in this country. The US has experienced several mass shootings and attacks by Christian terrorists.
If we are to take this claim seriously, we need data showing that Muslims disproportionately commit more religously-driven crimes in the US than people of other faiths.
I didn’t say that the claim was correct. I said that the claim is a different claim than “these people represent Islam as a whole and all or even most Muslims”.
That’s fine, that would be an interesting discussion to have, but so far what we have gotten is “@velocity thinks this or that about all muslims, and whatabout Christians, why doesn’t he think this of them?”
Okay, i read the article, and now i can’t see any connection between it and the topic of this thread. It seems to be about an elementary school in the UK, which is predominantly Pakistani Muslim. It has a few books for kids that include families that are mixed race or have two mothers. Some local Pakistani businessman who doesn’t have any kids in the school is protesting the lbgtq agenda, on behalf of the parents. (A role he claimed on his own, with no special support. He’s certainly not the designated spokesperson of some parental organization.) Meanwhile, a group of white hippies who also have no connection to the school are singing folk songs, outside the protest exclusion zone.
In this case, the people saying “it has to come from within” are basically the same as people saying “women can’t get the vote unless men agree to do it. Change needs to come from within the majority group”. Yeah, they dress it up as “colonialism”, but it’s basically a majority not wanting to hear from a minority. And as a practical matter, the hippies probably aren’t helping. But…
To get back to the point, while this particular incident may be interesting in other ways, i don’t understand what it has to do with whether we (and i think that “we” means "people of the US) are more allowed to criticize Christians, or less allowed, or…
Can you explain to me what it has to do with the topic?
The Venn diagram of those two statements overlaps heavily, as evidenced by those who keep citing those examples when discussing Islam as a whole - particularly as they don’t do the same when discussing Christianity.
Perhaps it might clear up some of the misunderstanding if you considered why they might do that.
I’m thinking this has wandered far from the op anyway. I don’t have a particular problem with Christian bashing in the US. They’ll be fine they are the majority in power. Muslims etc. are not. That is how it is and I don’t understand why people get so upset about it. Nothing will happen to make Christians the minority and other religions will continue to be the minority. Grow a thicker skin for pete’s sake.
Interesting characterization of the OP. How about: “the claim that there is a double standard against Christianity in the US is patently false, and here’s all the relevant information why.”
I don’t know how many threads on Christianity on this forum you have or have not participated in, but these kinds of examples - religiously motivated killing, religiously motivated persecution, everything from the Iraq War to the Westbro Baptist Church to the Crusades and the Inquisition - get brought up in every single one.
And to be clear, I don’t have any problem with that. Christianity, like many other religions, has a long and bloody history that isn’t fully over in some places. That’s fine to call out.
What I find strange is that in threads about religions other than Christianity we constantly see this “why does no one say this about Christianity” attitude. People do call out Christianity, all the time.
I’m also not sure if we’re supposed to be talking about the US, the UK, or the world in general. The incident was described as happening in the UK where the claim is that Muslims in the UK are more conservative than in the US, which may be true. I’ll admit I’m not very familiar with how this issue plays out in the UK. I live in Michigan very near Dearborn which has a huge Middle Eastern immigrant population including Muslims and Chaldeans. The city I live in also has a Middle Eastern population. I don’t have statistics but I’d bet they run moderate.
The article tries to back up its claim with global statistics which further confuses me about the context we are using here.
People also call out and mock Islam all the time, including Muslims, and yet we’ve been told by the person whose post spawned this thread - and others - that we don’t.
As I understand it, Velocity cited the editorial to show that the left has a double-standard in which the left won’t criticize homophobic Muslims (for example). The editorial cited Razzaq to buttress this idea: when a bunch of white hippies sang folk songs outside of a school, Razzaq criticized them.
But she didn’t criticize them for criticizing homophobic Muslims. She was criticizing homophobic Muslims herself! She just said that their particular actions weren’t especially helpful.
I brought up the issues with the white hippies in order to say the editorial’s point wasn’t supported by their example.
Since this thread seems to have veered off into never-never land, how about going back to the OP’s excellent post? That paragraph succinctly puts forward the truth of modern-day American attitudes.
All groups, not just Muslims, but atheists, Jews, and non-MAGA Christians, are being affected by a movement that openly proposes to destroy democracy. Muslims have never put one Shariah law into effect in the U.S.; an influential group of Christians in the highest offices in the land want to rewrite the Constitution to conform to their beliefs. Where is the Christianophobia when we need it?
Stop the whataboutism. Focus on a real and present emergency that doesn’t get sufficient attention because the utter pervasiveness and privilege of Christianity in every second of American life forbids it. Jokes are a very minor secondary manifestation comparatively, and overwhelmingly put forward by Christians just because of their sheer numbers. Persecution goes only one way: downward. Look at who’s at the top and consider that.
Yeah, not only is this clearly astroturfing, even the guy doing the astroturfing doesn’t want being gay to be illegal. Nobody here wants Sharia Law. And a huge part of the pushback is coming from Muslims themselves. The whole article contradicts the notion that the UK is a hotbed of Muslim intolerance.
We hope that because, if it’s a white Christian, people are unlikely to start beating up and/or murdering random white Christians and people who look to them like they might be white Christians; while if it’s somebody else there’s a pretty good chance that some white people claiming to be Christian will beat up and/or murder people in the group accused.
Do you have cites for them coming up on this site in threads in which nobody’s said Christianity doesn’t produce violent behavior in the way some other religion does?