Land of the Free, Home of the… What Now?

If the law doesn't fit, you must circumvent.

GOP presidential hopeful (stretching the definition of the word there, based on recent polls) Herman Cain recently joined the chorus on the right denouncing Islam as a whole, using the issue of a community in Tennessee that wants to stop an Islamic group from building a mosque to support their growing congregation. Cain agreed the community had the “right to do that” and “That’s not discriminating based on religion.” (Which begs the question of what -is- considered discrimination based on religion if stopping one particular religion from building their places of worship isn’t it.)

Cain went on to differentiate Islam from other religions, saying that it’s the only religion that comes with a set of laws, showcasing that he apparently has never read a Bible, Torah, or any other holy book for that matter, since they all come with laws; the other religions just ignore them more readily. On that point, he made the rather cryptic assertion that “there’s an aspect of them building that mosque that doesn’t get talked about, and the people in the community know what it is, and they’re talking about it.” Am the only one that gets Lovecraftian images of evil cults and human sacrifice out of that? Are the people in Tennessee the only ones aware that this portends the coming of The Great Old Ones, and they’re just trying to convince the doubtful world that could actually help them if we only believed? No, actually, he’s just keeping up with the boneheaded (and much more boring) argument that muslims are trying to secretly install Sharia Law in the United States. And this mosque in a Tennessee community I’m not even going to bother naming, because you’ve never heard of it, was apparently a key cog in that diabolical wheel.

So, let’s recap:

– Stopping a particular religion from building their places of worship solely because of what religion they practice is, in fact, not discriminating based on religion. (Please see the definition of “discriminate” and try again.)

– Islam is different from other religions because they actually take the backwards laws their religion preaches seriously, rather than sweeping them under the rug to sell their religion as a great place for peace and hugs. (Which is a massive generalization, since I’m sure plenty of followers of Islam ignore that shit just as well as any christian.)

– And finally, Dreaming Cthulhu is woken in his sleeping city, R’lyeh, and will soon be upon us. The luckiest among us will be the first to die. Ia! Ia! (Wgah’nagl fhtagn!)

Now, I feel like telling a little story to make my point here. It’s a little bedtime story I remember as a kid, and it might have a little bearing on this story. Let’s see if you guys remember it too, and can pick out the really subtle way it tells us about this issue:
Once, a long, long time ago, in a country far, far away, there was a great big empire that new it was a great big empire and wanted everyone else to know it too, so they went around planting flags in everybody’s back yards and called it their’s. Now, most people didn’t really like having their backyard taken by a great big empire, but what were they going to do about it? They were small and not so great, so they just had to follow along.

But one thing this great big empire couldn’t control was what the people in it thought. No matter how hard it tried, no matter how badly it punished people when it found out they were thinking these things it didn’t want them to think, people kept right on thinking them. Because that’s the way the human spirit is: if some outside force wants to control it, to hold it down, it becomes that much more devoted to its own freedom.

So, eventually, the king of this great big empire got tired of punishing those people whose minds he couldn’t control, and he sent them away, to a faraway land where he would only barely ever have to deal with them. But when all of those people were together, so far from the king’s eyes, they were able to think all kinds of other thoughts he wouldn’t want them to think. And they were able to plan things, and organize things, and pretty soon they decided they were greater than they’d believed all along, and that maybe the great big empire they’d been held down by wasn’t too big to stand against afterall.

In the end, they rose up and fought against the king’s army, and they won, and they made a home for themselves. And the people who started it all vowed their new home would be a place where people would be free, where they could believe whatever they wanted to believe, and that nobody would try to stop them from believing that, because the most basic freedom anyone can have is the freedom to think what you want to think. And they knew that if one group of people thought one thing, and the people in charge didn’t mind it, but another group that believed something different was fought against, then that would mean the people in charge were really favoring one belief over another, and that was just the same thing that the king had done to them.

It’s a nice little story, isn’t it? A real crowd pleaser.

It was Thomas Jefferson that first wrote of the separation of church and state, so that the laws of religion would never dictate the laws of the land, and that the state would not interfere with the free practice of religion. Herman Cain bastardized that belief as his defense for standing against the people of one religion, and completely inverted it. Sharia Law among the people that go to a particular mosque has no effect on the country at large. It would be the same as banning a Catholic church’s construction because they have ten rules people are supposed to follow. Until those rules find their way into the law of the land, there is no basis to cite the separation of church and state in your opposition. In fact, it is Herman Cain’s belief that the state has every right to intercede in this religious matter, where no laws of land have been broken.

In this instance, it is Herman Cain and the people that support his twisted belief that stand against the words of Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution of the United States. Last I heard, the star spangled banner waved over the land of the free and the home of the brave, not for the cowardice of men who would limit the freedom of people based solely on a belief that has been perverted by a few.

And, just because I’ve always wanted to say it: If you don’t like it, you can get out!