A Congressman and the Koran
You may have read that Minnesota has elected a Muslim, Keith Ellison, to the House of Representatives. Reb Ellison wants to use the Koran when he is sworn in. This has outraged some of our more xenophobic citizens, including Virginia Rep Virgil Goode who saw it as a threat to American values.
Goode also used it as an opportunity to fulminate against Muslims immigrants and call for a halt to such immigration. This neatly overlooks the fact that Ellison is a native born American who converted to Islam and as an African American has ancestors in this country from long before the Civil War.
Goode also overlooks the fact that the official swearing in ceremony makes no use of any holy book and it is merely a custom that Representatives hold a Bible for the official picture to show to the folks back home. Since the voters of Ellison's district were well aware he was a Muslim when they voted for him, they probably won't be too shocked if he holds a Koran.
Now Ellison has neatly finessed the situation. He is going to use the Koran owned and initialed by Thomas Jefferson. And as we all know (well, if you grew up in Virginia), Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, which is the district Goode represents.
By the way, what validity would an oath sworn on the Bible by a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a non-believer have anyway?
posted by Clemens @ 11:47 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Your last line nailed it.
Like Muslims, Christian Fundies are pretty intolerant of other religions. A reason why I tend not to like either but at least Bible thumpers don't behead infidels.
--Joey
No - though they used to burn them at the stake. Then they went through the 30 Years War and a few other little episodes of ethnic cleansing and discovered SKEPTICISM - a much undervalued trait. Andrew Sullivan says that (among other things) in defining his view of Conservatism (in that book Ms Ems gave me).
Glad you liked the last line. It is a tempest in a crankpot if there ever was one.
Well, as a former Christian fundie, I beg to differ. I was quite tolerant of other religions. That doesn't mean I bent over backwards to accomodate them, but it does mean that if I saw a Jew or a Muslim, I wasn't likely to taunt him, throw things at him, or object to his practicing his religion publicly and freely.
Admittedly, I was something of a loner.
My first encounter with intolerance was at the university, where non-religious people either viewed me as a threat to their notions of Christianity (I will never forget the reaction I got from one woman when I told her that yes, I thought abortion should be illegal) or where people told me that I believed things that I didn't believe at all.
It's easy to generalize from the specific, and we always tend to generalize the extremes.
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