I’m sorry, how is “homosexual” demeaning?
What oath would this be? It is a photo-op, I would be surprise if anybody actually swore anything. They just get their photos taken with their hand on their book of choice I doubt if any oath is actually sworn.
Irony tastes like burning. :smack:
While magellan01 is most certainly a homophobe, I don’t think his use of the term “homosexual rights” instead of “gay rights” is indicative of that fact, unless I missed some memo. He doesn’t want gays to have a full set of rights, no matter what you call those rights, so I’m not sure that it matters much anyway.
Oh, for the record, I find magellan01’s stances on many issues far closer to those of a fundamentalist muslim than Ellison’s stances are. Perhaps we should be more “vigilant” when regarding him.
Let’s see. Elswhere you have claimed to have been forthcoming with mea culpas and apologies. I had asked you for examples. You provided none. And if you think your word is better simply because you don’t admit error, that’s part and parcel to your problem. You may want to talk to a professional with a couch.
Except excluding people based on religion has always been anathema to American culture.
I did not and do not advocate exclusion. But yes, I feel that a society needs things that bind it. That that is in and of itself a good thing for the functioning of society.
No freedom is absolute. Maintaining otherwise is pablam, possibly suicidal. We put limits on freedom of speech, for heaven’s sake, when it conflicts with public safety. What makes you think that we shouldn’t be able to put limits on freedom of religion schizophrenic? And what I am asking for is simple vigilance. Seems perfectly sensible to me.
How do you know it wil pass? Every great society in history has fallen. And it all started at some point based on some decisions that were made whose effects were not accurately foreseen. But assuming it does come to pass, what costs might we incur? Let me ask you, Lemur866, is there any limit to the cost you are williing to incur before you might limit one of our freedoms? Was Lincoln *necessarily *wrong in suspending habeus corpus?
I owe you nothing. It is not my responsibility to provide you with anything. Based on your absolute refusal to recognize the overwhelming evidence against most of your general silliness in this thread, it would clearly be a waste of my time to provide any evidence for you to cavalierly dismiss.
Now, if you will stop hijacking your arguments to attack me, you can go back to your xenophobic rant against duly elected representatives for failing to partake in traditions that you have retroactively invented for the occasion.
Oh wow you’re still at it 
Okay you’re a troll or a tard magellan01, or maybe a bigot which would automatically make you a tard anyway.
Society isn’t going to crumble just because someone used a Koran for swearing. He could use a penthouse and it wouldn’t affect his ability to do congressy things.
In fact I think you are a bigot. What other motivation could push you to make yourself look like such a moron attempting to defend some bit religous censorship?
So please please click here (anyone else might want to mute sound if you’re at work or near kids or something.)
“Vigilance”? You know as well as I do that Shari’a will never be the law in any part of the U.S., not even if we drop all immigration restrictions tomorrow and only Muslims choose to take advantage. The Islamic-fundamentalist world-view, like the Jewish Orthodox world-view, will always be marginal, and therefore harmless, in the U.S. In Iran, it’s toxic. Here, it will only add to our rich cultural diversity.
No one is disagreeing with you about a society needing shared values to hold it together. Everyone here is on the same page on that subject. What we’re objecting to is what you’re trying to use to tie us together. When you complain about Muslims “injecting” their religion into our government where (you say) that it is not wanted, you are not drawing us together. You’re driving us apart. You’re spliting the country into “us” and “them.” Even if you’re magnanimous enough to allow non-Christians to participate, you are still, in effect, saying that this is “our” (as in, Christians’) government, and that non-Christians are participating on your sufferance. That’s no way to run a democracy. Our government is for the people, by the people, and of the people. So long as we have Muslim citizens living and voting in this country, ours is in part a Muslim government.
And yet, you’ve had remarkably poor success in getting anyone else to see the sense in your position.
Purely an effect of the board’s liberal bias, I’m sure.
Is your foresight so accurate, then, that you know precisely what the outcome of your course of action might be?
That’s a meaningless question in this context, because the cornerstone of the argument being put to you is that your course of action will make us pay a higher cost than ours. The opposition to you is not wholly philosophical. It is also practical: your reasoning is astoundingly flawed. The idea that the country can be drawn together by focusing on things not shared by a significant percentage of its population is absurd on its face. It flies in the face of reason and human nature. It’s precisely the attitude that led to the destruction of many of those fallen great societies of the past. It’s the sort of attitude this country was founded to specifically avoid. Opposing you here does not require any sort of trade off between freedom and stability: it is the freedom against which you are arguing that provides us with stability in the first place.
In the darkest times of dangerous crisis, new superheroes are sometimes born. When babies were threatened, when childlike innocence was in peril, costumed crusaders appeared to save them. Apparently, when completely infantile ideas about cultural purity are in danger, they too will have their defender. Thus was born –
THE MAGPIE: CULTURE WARRIOR.
Episode I: I slam, you slam, we all slam Islam!
(The scene: Washington, D.C. – the Capitol Building)
Congressman: I do solemnly swear that–
PA-BLAM!!!
Magpie: Once again, I arrive in the nick of TIME. Thank me all you must, but I won’t accept a DIME.
Bystander #1: Um … you just blew away a U.S. congressman. Who are you?
Magpie: I am the Magpie, here to kill and maim; to make sure things all stay the same. All of us need uniformity. By “us,” of course, I mean lots of ME. What culture, you ask, is worth my war? I keep it in my bureau drawer. Dick and Jane and Spot are there; and mayonnaise on picnic fare. Baseball, an Andy Hardy movie; but nothing funky, chic nor groovy! This land needs things that bind it, man! And I’m a cultural dose of bran.
Bystander #2: But he was taking an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution…
Magpie: Good sir, it’s not what passes through his lips – look under the traitor’s fingertips!
Bystander #3: Taking the oath of office on the Qu’ran? What does it mean?
Bystander #1: I dunno – that he was sincere?
Magpie: I do not know what’s in this book. So it must be a plan for oaths forsook!
Bystander #1: “Forsook?”
Magpie: PA-BLAM!!!
Bystander #2: Well, I’m certainly prepared to believe you!
Magpie: A Qu’ran precedes Sharia Law. My logic is without a flaw. Any part of this thing foreign, exists entire in every Kor-an. There’s no separating law from God, (or won’t be soon, you heathen clod)!
Bystander #3: Hey, those guys over there are eating strudel!
Magpie: Oooh, Nazis! PA-BLAM!!! Take that, you dirty sons of lies! Apples are for sauce or pies/occasionally, to caramelize!
Bystander #2: Wow, our enemies really are everywhere!
Bystander #3: Viva el Magpie!
Magpie: Viva, eh? I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition! PA-BLAM!!! Torquemada, meet your demolition!
Bystander #2: Well, I guess I’ll be going now…would you mind answering a couple of questions?
Magpie: I live to serve, good sir, I do – what little matters trouble you?
Bystander #2: First, why do you talk like Underdog?
Magpie: I hope to win the heart of she/whose genes are clean and white and free/of influences black as pitch/like Polly Purebred – what a bitch!
Bystander #2: Um…cool. Uh, my next question is, if you’re here to protect American culture, why do you dress like you just escaped from Cirque du Soleil?
Magpie: PA-BLAM!!!
I don’t think that’s true. There are people who think that all change is progress and that attempting to hold onto anything from the past, especially something designed by white, heterosexual, male Christians is holding onto somethiny unfortunate and unhealthy.
And if the people who showed up in this thread constituted the whole population I’d be inclined to agree with you. But I hope you’ll forgive me for not thinking that the handful of people here represent the country as a whole. Do you really think that I’m the only person who believes as I do? If so, a road trip through small towns throughout the country might be very educational. And some of the people you encounter might even be wearing shoes.
There *is * an “us” and “them”. There is the “us” who are law abiding Americans going about our lives, paying taxes, trying to raise families in what used to be a much better country. We’ve rightly embraced things to improve us, increasing diversity and tolerance. But in what has turned into the blind pursuit of those things we have suspended the ability, or even the willingness to judge, what we make part of the American fabric.
There is also the “us” and “them” defined by this very debate, which is to what you refer. That I would be the sole advocate of vigilance toward a group that has thousands, millions of adherents around the world who want to kill us is absolutely astounding, even given the slant of the board. And that point is not academic, they did kill us. 9/11 took 3,000 lives, ther was the WTC bombiing before that, and don’t forget the Cole and the marine barracks in Beirut. The list foes on. Expand “us” to include other non-Muslim wesrterners and you have bombings in England, Bali, Spain, and elsewhere. Terrorist cells and sympathizers have been found within our borders. If you or others want to ignore the threat until it is so big that it is imposible to ignore, that is your perogative, as is waiting until enclaves are so strongly Muslim that our laws will be bent to submit to Islam. I have the perogative of exercising both foresight and prudence. That this position is riduculed and my right to hold it derided would be laughable, if humor was an appropriate emotion in this context.
To say that there is some inviolate rule that cannot be encroached upon, even for our own survival (no, that is not the issue now) is the most plainly stupid position to ever escape a pie hole. It goes against human instinct to keep oneself and one’s progeny alive. In that regard it is a contortion of what it means to be human, making it is as disgusting as it is imbecilic. Miller, much of this is not directed at you, so forgive me. But I’m going to just put it all here and be done with it.
Now, even given all that, I accept that my opinion needn’t be held by anyone else. I also acknowledge that though I might feel extremely strongly about the issue, that I do not hold an exclusive on passion. I accept that there are differing estimations of all elements of the debate: the liklihood of the threat, its severity should it occur, the benefit of tradition, the interpretation of history, etc.—not to mention the reality of the uncertainty of any course of action taken, regardless of intention. Yet, I have made great effort to engage as many posters as I can in a serious and fair discussion. I accept that I have been unable to convince others of my opinion, and I’m fine with that. It’s quite amazing that so many others feel the need to resort to any attack in an attempt to silence a dissenting voice. Especially when they wrap themselves in the righteous cloak of tolerance and understanding. Again, not you, **Miller. **
Sheeze. I’m “saying”, here is reality, folks. I can’t change the fact that this country sprouted up from a culture that was Christian, and that the bible has played such a omnipresent role in our official ceremonies. That’s just the way it is. I don’t think that any of us can accurately predict if some selectively altered landscape might have resulted in the same nation being born. Maybe it would have, Maybe a better one. For whatever the reasons, looking at the history of mankind, we lucked out. Because we did I advocate two things; holding on to some of that heritage and being very careful each and every time we consciously deviate from it. That leaves open the need to change, but it also tasks us with the burden of vigilance.
And just why in the world couldn’t a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Martian be part of our society, even part of our government, while not allowing these other religions to be intertwined with the running of the government? We’ve pretty much had that by default for over two hundred years. It’s worked pretty well.
Nicely done. Now you may phrase it in the offensive manner you have (I choose to think my fellow citizens, en masse, would not embrace a religion so tied—in our own time— to the worst violence and atrocities imaginable), but the fact remains, the government could run just fine with rules in place. There are age guidelines, the President has to have been born a citizen. And I’m pretty sure trials have to be held in English. Why in the world must other’s religions be injected into our governance? Or language. All it does is erode the common denominator of our shared heritage. Which is exactly the point for some.
So? Do you not think I could go on to other boards and represent the majority opinion and enjoy the kind of support virtually everyone else in this thread enjoys? I’m more concerned in me being comfortable with what I think than with *others *being comfortable with what I think. I enjoy hearing dissentiing opinions and being challenged—in a serious and honest way, of course, not with the sophmoric stupidity of many of the posters in this thread who somehow see honor in piling on, tag-teaming, and hurling ad hominem attacks.
I don’t go whining about this, but it is a fact that this board leans strongly to the left.
No. Neither is yours or anyone else’s. It is impossible. That is precisely why I advocate slower, more deliberated change. Things are pretty good in America. I’d think we should be careful not to fuck it up. If we had a country as fucked up as many around the world I’d be much less resistant to deviating from what is.
Meaningless? It is the opposite of meaningless. You correctly point out that the cornerstone of the argument is one position will require we pay a higher cost than the other. I was/am asking where a particular poster’s tipping point would be, in order to gauge both if there is a bar and where it is. That is a crucial estimation. It will reveal how far apart we really are. I find it odd that you would want to deprive the discussion of that information. Really. Why?
But you are asking the same thing. You simply hold differnt things as being more important. I am quite willing to make small sacrifices in order to gain more safety. You, not so much.
That is precisley how I feel about not wanting to be vigilant or not beiing willing to hold safety above other considerations when circumstances dictate. It goes against human instinct.
Miller, while there is some truth in this, it is not absolute. Complete freedom would result in chaos and the immediate downfall of society. We need order. We also need common sense. When a threat presents itself, the effective battle cry is not “more freedom”, it is a measured response tailored to fend off the threat. And I doubt if you or I or historians would be able to say why and society fell and state it as a fact.
Miller, once again I appreciate your time and effort you’ve put into the back and forth. While I will be interested to see your responses, I’ll let you know I am bowing out of this discussion. As I mentioned earlier in the thread I’m pretty busy with work right now and I’ll be doing myself a favor to eliminate this distraction.
Until next time…
The King of Soup,
You are no dupe.
Your post above,
I just love.
Or else we’ll be eaten by bears. We get it already.
Post #771, though, does need some illustrations. Who’s the best nominee?
Jack Chick
Of coursae, not. There were thousands of your predecessors who strove mightily (and violently) to prevent that corrupt and grasping religion, Romish papism, from forcing its way into American society. Later, there were attempts, even in Congress, to prevent grasping Jews and inscrutable Orientals from entering our pristine environment, (well, pure, anyway, once we’d wiped out the savage Indians). There were others, recently, who went out and killed and beat people with swarthy skin following the WTC/Pentagon attacks in order to demonstrate their fear and hatred of those “other” people. (It was unfortunate, of course, that the good citizens so inclined kept messing up and harming Sikhs and Hindus because they could not even figure out who was really a Muslim, but there are, indeed, people who share your fears.)
You mean like Representative Ellison?
And you think that retroactively inventing a tradition of which you were not even aware two months ago is “making” part of the American fabric?
Vigilance and prudence are wonderful things. Casting blame on a billion people and choosing to distrust every one of them because of one faction (that is actually opposed by the majority of adherents to that system) is not prudent; it makes enemies of those who would have been out allies and forces them to join forces with those who are our enemies.
Demonstrating that hatred and mistrust by pretending one must be suspicious of hidden motives in a publicly elected official whose motives are on public record goes beyond imprudent to paranoid.
But you have not promoted “holding on” to some honored tradition. You have promoted a curious interpretation of a non-existent tradition, the core of which is rank hypocrisy. Everyone should use this artifact because people used to use this artifact. We will ignore why they used this artifact; we will ignore all the occasions when the artifact was not used and no one complained; we will simply declare a new need to employ that artifact, based on the words of a person who does not even believe in the truths written in that artifact, for the purpose of demonstrating hatred for a small group of people expressed as a fear of a large group of people.
Exactly. To the extent that we have succeeded, it has been by separating all religions from government and not letting any of them have a stake in running the government. That has not changed in any way by a person continuing the tradition of pledging his oath by calling upon the powers expressed in his holiest written word.
Of course, it is you, not we, who are injecting religion into governance. No one in this thread has proposed that any religion be made a part of governance–except you, with your odd characterization that Rep. Ellison did it in a photo op that has no force of law while somehow 434 other representatives did not by performing the identical action with a different book.
Who, in this thread, holds that position?
I never claimed that the people on this board represent the nation as a whole. That’s the entire point of my argument: this subject is not a unifying one. You could get a significant percentage of the country on your side by following your advice. You would also alienate a significant percentage of the country. Therefore, what you are advocating does not bind us together. It drives a large portion of the country away.
Bullshit, we’ve lost that. We’ve just learned enough to focus on what’s actually important in binding us together, and not the incidentals that have a long, long history of driving people apart. Religion has been one of the most destructive forces in history. It’s also been a positive, creative force, don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-religious at all, but cultures that use religion as their primary cultural identifier tend to react violently with cultures that use different religions as their cultural identifier. For a pluralistic society to survive, it is vital that religion not be used as an identifier, because it will, inevitably, lead to a fracturing and Balkanization of that society.
We’ve not given up our ability to judge. Read this thread, and you can see that quite a few people have come up with a pretty negative judgement about you. Why? Because you aren’t judging on the facts, you’re judging on the stereotype. You’re judging people just for being Muslim, without bothering to find out what kind of Muslim they are. You’re pre-judging them. You are, literally, prejudiced against Muslims.
And most of us consider that to be something that we don’t want to see in our country. We’re more than happy to make judgements about that.
It’s not that astounding when you realize that “millions” of people out of a population of over a billion amounts to only a few percentage points of Muslims who want to kill us. How many millions of Muslims do you think want to kill Americans? Let’s be generous and say ten million. That means that over 90% of Muslims don’t want to kill Americans. And I’m pretty sure the number of militant anti-American Muslims in the world falls well short of ten million.
We don’t want to ignore the threat. But we also don’t want to waste time worrying about people who are clearly no threat at all. That just exposes us to greater danger. If we spend time scrutinizing every single Muslim in the country, even those who are, say, running for office as liberal Democrats, just on the off hand chance that they’re Wahabbist terrorists, we’re engaging in a collossal waste of time and diffusion of resources that makes it easier for the real dangers to slip under our radar. Not to mention, treating every Muslim as our enemy plays directly into the propaganda of those self-same terrorists. If we keep saying all Muslims are our enemy, and Al Qaeda keeps saying we’re the enemy of all Muslims, the middleground of Muslims who really aren’t our enemy is going to shrink pretty fucking rapidly.
That’s not directed at me? Really? Pray tell, exactly what are the people that is levelled at advocating that I am not advocating?
I think you’re being disingenuous here, because you only call for this kind of vigilance when it suits your particular political agenda. We have, for example, a long history of looking the other way when people enter this country illegally. And so far, this has worked pretty well for us. Now you want to institute a radical change in how this country handles illegal immigration. Where is your caution on this subject? Where is your vigilance for how your changes for the country on this issue might harm our country in the long run?
At any rate, I maintain that those of us arguing against you have examined the issue, and have thought long and hard about it, and have come to the conclusion, after much thought, that you’re full of shit. Your position is counter-productive, illogical, and self-destructive. That’s not a kneejerk reaction based on a unconsidered rush for inclusiveness. It’s a carefully weighed and considered opinion.
Because the purpose of a representative government is to - get this - represent the people who live under that government. If you keep the government scrupulously Christian, if you demand that non-Christians leave their religion at the state house door, you’re not representing them. And as the percentage of people in this country who are not Christian grows, they are going to become more and more disenchanted and disengaged from our government, and more prone to radicalism and political violence.
You found that offensive? Really? What other portions of the Gettysburg Address do you find offensive?
Because Christianity is not our shared heritage! If you’re a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Hindu, Christianity is not part of your heritage! I can’t believe you’re still trying to push such a transparently stupid argument! Yes, our country was founded by Christians. It was also founded by white people. And while our founders went out of their way to write religious equality into the Constitution, they were conspicuously quiet on the subject of racial equality. Why not make whiteness our “common denominator of our shared heritage?”
Because it’s irrelevant to the discussion. We’re not arguing any sort of trade off, so it doesn’t matter where anyone places the bar. Everyone in this thread is aiming at the same target: a safer, more united country. Asking people about how much safety they’re willing to sacrifice for their ideals is a strawman, because nobody in this thread is advocating anything that they feel would make us less safe. Your question is a meaningless distraction.
See, that’s a misrepresentation of what I’ve been saying. You want to make a sacrifice that will make us less safe. My position will make our country stronger by focusing on our shared values, provide a powerful counter-argument to the Islamist extremists who want all out war between Islam and the West, and holds to and supports the very values that made this country great in the first place. You want to give all that up out of a naked, irrational fear of anything different.
You mistake blindness for vigilance.
Yes, and the threat before us is not Islam. The threat before us is religious fundamentalism and intolerance. The threat is both the maniacs in Al Qaeda, and the reactionaries in this country who play directly into Al Qaeda’s hands by treating all Muslims as our enemies. The threat before us is you, magellan, every bit as much as the people who have attacked our cities and killed our citizens.
Well, this thread has been an interesting rhetorical exercise, and I’ve actually needed the distraction from work, so thanks for that. If you don’t ever make it back to this thread, let me just say in closing,
Ha ha! I win! I win!
I’m sorry, but in maggie’s defense xenophobia IS one of our national traditions.
Yes, but only in the general sense that there have always been Nativists and Know-Nothings and Klansmen and Jingoists and Red Baiters in our midst. Despite the tradition of that loud minority, the country has continued (sometimes reluctantly) to welcome and even invite strangers to come here. Besides, his later claim was “vigilance” against “Islam” which, while certainly the current manifestation of xenophobia, is not actually the thing against which he was originally arguing. His initial arguments were those of blindly following Prager’s odd and never substantiated claim that we had a “tradition” that “held us togerther” and that Ellison broke it.