Abortion, gay marriage and American dhimmitude

Ever since 9/11, conservatives of the “clash of the civilizations” stripe have had a favorite word they like to casually toss at appeasing lefties: “Dhimmi.” It’s an Arabic word that applies, basically, to lesser status of non-Muslims in Muslim lands. Any time public officials wrestle with how to accommodate Muslims in America — say, when Muslim cabdrivers say they don’t want to carry passengers toting alcohol — cries of “dhimmitude” go up all along the right, with dreary consistency, an alarm that any accommodation with religious zealots whatsoever will surely result in the fall of Western civilization.

I suspect the same folks who scream “dhimmi” with some regularity, though, will have no real problem with this:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

They want to signal to the Obama administration and to Congress that they are still a formidable force that will not compromise on abortion, stem-cell research or gay marriage. They hope to influence current debates over health care reform, the same-sex marriage bill in Washington, D.C., and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Ostensibly, these religious organizations don’t want to be forced to provide abortions, host gay marriages or even provide benefits to same sex partners of their employees. But it seems unlikely that any proposals on these issues would end up with that result. “Conscience clauses” largely prohibit physicians from being forced to provide medical services they find objectionable, and the First Amendment pretty much ensures no Catholic Church will ever be required to perform a marriage ceremony between Adam and Steve. It should be pretty easy to resolve these concerns, right?

Probably not. The churches don’t just want to abstain from what they believe to be immoral practices; they’re trying to influence policy and legislation so the rest of us must also abstain. I don’t really like that, but I suppose that’s their right.

But it’s interesting to me that the same folks who get the vapors when Muslim women want to use a gym separate from men are more or less the exact same folks who will defend to the death the right of a Catholic pharmacist (say) to refuse to dispense birth control pills.*

We’re expected to defer to and accommodate religious sensibilities in the public square, it seems, except when we’re not. We’re all dhimmis now.

*Christopher Hitchens, of course, is the exception to this. He thinks all of you are crazy.

Fort Hood: Why Christians can’t be trusted

This is certainly shocking:

“Of course, most U.S. Christians don’t shoot up abortion doctors. Fine. As soon as Christians give us a foolproof way to identify their doctor-killers from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to carry guns. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Christians can once again carry guns. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a doctor-killing-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Christian-phobia, it is Christian-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

Oh wait. Sorry. The quote got a little screwed up. Here’s the real one:

“Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

You know what? We absolutely need to be careful when Army officers go around rooting for suicide bombers. It seems increasingly clear the armed forces dropped the ball when it came to the proclivities of Maj. Nidal Hasan. There are fundamentalist extremists Muslims out there — we all lived through September 11 — and we clearly need to be on guard. But there are extremists and fundamentalists in many religions. I doubt Bryan Fischer would appreciate being lumped in with doctor killers. And it wouldn’t be fair to do so. Too bad he doesn’t understand that.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Reihan Salam on the Fort Hood shooting

I’ve been at a loss over what to say about the Fort Hood shooting. I think Atrios was on to something yesterday when he wrote “When your first reaction to tragic events is to consider how they might support your politics, it’s time to go for a nice long walk.” Indeed. I was initially tempted this morning to write something like: “When Christians commit murder in politically motivated contexts, it’s an aberration. When Muslims commit murder in politically motivated contexts, it’s time to gird our loins for a clash of the civiliations.” That feels right, but it also feels snarkier than events deserve.

A few months ago, when Scott Roeder killed George Tiller, lots of conservatives urged us not to blame the wider anti-abortion movement for the crimes of one disturbed man. Lots of us on the left — including me — suggested it wasn’t so easy. Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Some of the “clash of the civilization” conservatives are making the case that the Fort Hood shootings are exactly what millions and millions of Muslims love to see. I’d rather not believe that. But it’s truly depressing to see all the usual suspects flee to all the usual positions when something catastrophic happens. The sound you just heard? A million knees jerking all at once.

At the Daily Beast, conservative Reihan Salam offers some thoughts worth considering:

Overnight, Twitter feeds and message boards pulsed with anti-Muslim anger. This kind of venting is important to a free society. But it could also be an ominous sign of tensions to come. It is thus no surprise that groups like the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations have been so quick to condemn the violence. The vast majority of Americans recognize that Hasan doesn’t represent all Muslims, just as the Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho didn’t represent all Korean-Americans. Yet people who are on the fence about whether Muslims can be trusted could tip over into believing that they can’t.

Hasan’s most important victims are the families who’ve lost loved ones and the soldiers who’ve lost comrades. They deserve our deepest sympathies. Yet Hasan’s other victims are the millions of Muslim Americans who’ve fully embraced American life, and who feel a profound sense of dread whenever innocent people are murdered in the name of Islam.

And the wise James Fallows offers these remarks at his Atlantic blog:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

That anti-Islam speaker at Temple

Geert Wilders will speak tonight at Temple. The guy is seen as something of a free speech crusader by many American conservatives because he denounces Islam — not just Muslim extremists, but the whole religion — producing an angry backlash from Muslims and liberals and, for a time, a ban on travel in the UK because of the short anti-Islam film, Fitna, that he made. He’s a bit of a jerk.

Tonight’s speech at Temple has produced the usual assortment of backlash and defense. First, the defense:

David Horowitz, of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which funded the event, issued a letter asking university officials to disregard the concerns of the Muslim students.

“The Temple community should reject the call by the MSA to censor free speech on the Temple campus, and should recognize it for what it is – an assault on the right of all Americans to have a democracy that is inclusive, tolerant and respectful of the rights of others,” he wrote.

What’s interesting about this is that conservatives so vigorously defend Wilders’ speeches in the name of “a democracy that is inclusive, tolerant and respectful of the rights of others.” By that definition — and certainly by American standards — Wilders is anything but a small-d democrat.

Wilders, after all, has called for a ban on the Koran in the Netherlands. He has also proposed a tax on headscarves, in order to discourage Muslim women from practicing their faith as they choose. He doesn’t believe that a “moderate Islam” is possible — extremism is the true version of the faith — so he wants to eradicate that faith from his society.

Now because I’m pretty devoted to the First Amendment, I think Wilders should be allowed to have his say tonight — same as I think Nazis, Klan members, flat earthers and other kooks should be able to have their say. But I’m bewildered at American conservatives who celebrate Wilders as a free speech hero when he wants to deprive his fellow citizens of their most basic right to freely practice their religion.

Here’s a hint, guys: Real civil rights heroes don’t attain that status by trying to deprive rights to others.

Guess the ‘Islamic’ part of ‘Islamic Republic’ is just a joke

If an “Islamic” regime has to choose between celebrating Ramadan and holding onto power and it chooses power, can we all agree that Islam is the tool, not the purpose, of that regime?

Andy McCarthy: President Obama likes Iranian theocracy better than democracy

Andy McCarthy actually gets paid for these opinions at National Review:

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of “social justice,” and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, ”There Is No God but Politics”, comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — “equal rights” and “social justice” are always more rally-cry propaganda than real.

Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely.  That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.

I don’t quite know how to rationally respond to this because I don’t think it’s rational. It’s paranoid and delusional — this idea that the president secretly hates freedom and secretly hates democracy and secretly loves Stalin: Basically, that President Obama secretly hates everything that makes America America. In short: President Obama is evil.

I don’t want or need Andrew McCarthy to like Barack Obama or his policies. I do think that he has a responsibility to confine his critiques to what is provable and knowable about the president instead of spinning out a crazy fantasy that presumes to know the president’s inner thoughts. He’s got plenty of ground to disagree with Obama on what Obama has done without resorting to feverish speculation.

That’s not really McCarthy’s style.

I should be clear here. These assertions that Obama is a secret communist, secret fascist, secret lover of totalitarianism are gutter talk and gutter thinking on the same level as the “Obama is a secret Muslim” crap. And I’d dismiss it except that National Review is one of the leading organs of mainstream conservative thought. If this is what mainstream conservatives write and think, we can only guess and fear at what’s going on with the extremist loons.

Honor killings or domestic violence? Either way, women lose.

Here’s a headline at National Review today: Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?

I’ll let Michael Rubin explain himself:

Muzzammil Hassan’s beheading of his wife in Buffalo shortly before Valentine’s Day was an unfortunate reminder of how the phenomenon of honor killings has come to North America. Many Islamist advocacy groups have argued that discussing the phenomenon shows Islamophobia and, while tragic, honor killings are really no different than other domestic violence. In the forthcoming Middle East Quarterly, Phyllis Chesler presents her study of over 50 episodes of honor killing in the United States and Canada to argue that they really are quite distinct from domestic violence. Her study, here.

Chesler’s study points out that domestic violence is a problem in the United States, so I don’t want to impugn any ill motives to her. Nonetheless, it needs to be pointed out that for the victims, there’s not much point to the distinction between an honor killing and a death from domestic violence.

I understand Rubin is trying to push the whole “clash of the civilizations” idea here, but there’s something more than a little unseemly about asking if honor killings are “simply” — merely — domestic violence. It needlessly trivializes domestic violence, and it does so in misguided fashion. Chesler, after all, acknowledges that 21,000 American women died in domestic violence attacks between 1989 and 2004; that far surpasses the 50 or so American “honor killings” that she studies and that Rubin seems to suggest make Islam uniquely awful.

The chief distinction seems to be one of premeditation. Honor killings are painstakingly premeditated and planned; domestic violence is more casual, heat-of-the-moment. Why either would speak well — or better — of one culture over another is beyond me.

Fair’s fair

Via TAPPED, it’s good to see McCain supporters standing against ugly bigotry: