Posted by
flagwaver on Monday, December 04, 2006 2:07:14 PM
After reading a couple of articles at Townhall by Dennis Prager and Mike Adams, and especially some of the responses to those columns, I feel the need to weigh in on the issue in the articles. The articles are about the request of newly elected Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota to be sworn in using a Quran instead of the Bible. This has ginned up a great deal of angst and anger at Mr. Ellison's request, or if you prefer demand, not to be forced to swear an oath on a book that he does not believe in.
What has gotten to me is the quickness of conservatives to attack Mr. Ellison and to attempt to make this an issue that does not really concern personal religious choices. But despite all of the yelling, name calling, and claims of supporting cherished traditions this is precisely about personal religious choices.
The idea that Keith Ellison should be forced to stand in public and be forced to swear an oath on the Bible, just so that some so-called tadition is preserved is repugnant to me. I cannot for the life of me see how a group of people that claim to so love the Constitution as much as conservatives, can fix their mouths to say that this man should be forced to ignore his religious convictions to please them! Further, I do not understand how people that are usually sober, reflective, and responsible could go off the deep end in trying to enforce some vaunted tradition; one, by the way no one cared about until now!
This is not about some foreign power attempting to subvert America; the last I checked Keith Ellison was from Minnesota. It is not about the creep of multiculturalism, nor is it about an African-American attempting to get special treatment. It is about a Muslim elected to office in America and whether his right to practice the religion of his choice will be respected.
Which leads me to observe the selective hypocrisy of many in the conservative movement. I have been thinking and talking about this issue for some time, and this incident is just the latest example to pop up. We conservatives have to decide whether we are what we say we are, or if we actually believe what we say we do. We cannot continue to claim we want smaller government, while embracing big spending plans by the GOP. We cannot continue to pretend we believe in free speech when we are just as quick as the left to shout down voices we disagree with. And we cannot continue to scream about the left's 'War on Christmas" and the forcing of secular humanism on us, all the while saying that Keith Ellison has to conform to our religious beliefs/traditions. Doing anything else gives truth to the claims of Left Angle, Kimberley, and Phylo Se Phizer that we are hypocrites!
Claiming that allowing Keith Ellison to be sworn in using the Quran is going to create a slippery slope may be true. But the real slippery slope is in trying to force him to ignore his religious beliefs in order to please the tradition loving majority. The real slippery slope is in deciding that we will protect the free exercise rights of the religious...so long as they agree with our religion.
We are always telling ourselves that we are better than that, aren't we? We like to say that our conservative values are underpinned by the free exchange of ideas, so why are we acting so much like the left in this instance? If we are truly about the free exchange of ideas and are not afraid of new ideas, let's try to act like it!
Because if we continue to insist on forcing Keith Ellison's hand down on a Bible, just to appease us, we will have abandoned the ideology we claim to be believers in. We will have become the very things that we accuse the liberals of being...intolerant, freedom hating religious bigots.
I do not think that is the slope we want to slide down. Is it?