Okay, so the leader of the church has backed down, and there will be no burning of the Quran on Saturday. I don't know what prompted his decision to cancel the event, and I don't really care. But I can say that I'm very proud of our country at this point.
In all the rhetoric, speech-making, protesting, and repudiation, from what I saw, there was no hint or suggestion that it wasn't his right to hold this event. No government agency stood tall and intimidating and said, "No! You won't do this!" Several high ranking officials did communicate with the church leader and expressed their concerns with the impact of the message he was sending, but none of them told him that he couldn't do it.
We have an amazing country where the entire world can be against a legal act be committed by one of our citizens, and all our national leaders support that citizen's right to commit that act. They also supported that citizen's right to deal with the aftermath of the act which were going to be plentiful.
My own response to all this has been mixed. I find the message he was trying to send to be reprehensible. I'm disgusted by the rationale he used to justify the whole scheme. It was a grand-stand stunt to incur attention to himself, and he hid behind religion until he couldn't any longer. I cannot call him a pastor or reverend because I don't believe he deserves those common religious honorifics based on his behavior. I can call him a leader in that he did lead people, albeit down a wrong path. But I cannot respect him.
At the same time, I cannot deny him the right to make an ass out of himself when he chooses to.
1 comment:
The way I saw it, he was abusing one of his Constitutionally protected rights to step all over someone else's.
The whole point of being an "American"...a citizen of the United States, is to welcome and defend all rights to freedom from religious and political persecution. It's what we were founded on. It's why we're here.
He's no different than those KKK chuckleheads. They wave the Flag, they quote the Bible, and yet they represent the exact opposite of what our culture is SUPPOSED to be about.
As I reminded my 16 year old nephew in a recent debate about the proposed Mosque in NYC, it's supposed to be "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" not "give me your white, your Christian, your middle-class".
Post a Comment