Can We Talk Values ?

Mr. Obama now represents American values both at home and abroad (Hillary likes to help when it comes to lecturing our foreign friends.)  In his job he gets to regularly cite his view about American values on a variety of topics – business, commerce, education, health care, taking care of others, race relations and Islam.

Islam?  Why did that sneak into the list?  Well, he says Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion and that it is only its small group of radical members who don’t follow those peaceful and tolerant precepts.  In other words Islam is consistent with American values.  We too are a peaceful and tolerant people (unless you mess with us) with the one possible exception of our tendency to incarcerate citizens for possession of certain flora specimens.

Okay – we’ll buy into that for the time being.

Now, in America, over the brief lifetime of this essayist, we can recall a number of interesting “religion” based occurrences.  To wit –

·         God is dead; get rid of God from the public arena; don’t subject anyone to God except in the church, temple or mosque of their voluntary choosing

·         Criticism of certain religions is commonplace, particularly if only men can be priests or they like bingo or don’t want to pay for or provide birth control and abortions to their female employees.  As a matter of fact, we now will use the power of the government to force such payments

·         Public ridicule of the images and historical characters of certain religious figures is to be tolerated – government will not and cannot prevent such displays – Jesus in urine or Mary in drag or whatever

·         No public moneys for private or parochial education – no vouchers – no funding of school choice – if you want your kid to attend religious school you get to pay twice – once for the public school you choose to not use and again for the school of your choice.  Sorry, no madrassa vouchers  

·         Public education cannot teach the possibility that there is a God or that some form of Power or Whatever could have had some Hand in the very scheme of things or the very being of things – taboo; save it for Saturday/Sunday school

Enough examples – you can probably come up with others and better ones.

So, can Islam exist in a society with this set of values is our question?

Deny the existence of God or his messenger or his book – Quran?

Make fun of any aspect of Islam similar to the examples offered above?

Shut out any reference to any aspect of Islam in any government activity or place?

Prohibit any public funds going to any Islamic activity?  Yep, that means no madrassa vouchers.

What would change if America were to behold a growing and substantial indigenous Islam population?  American values or Islamic values?  OMG.  Is it okay to even ask these questions?   How does one reconcile the concept of fatwa with that freedom of speech and religion business?  Shut up – best to not ask that question either.  We had better stop with this entire exercise right now before we go too far. 

ps:  It seems, and we may be wrong about this, that the only sure confluence of American values and Islamic values is the interweaving thread of imposed political correctness.  Which political correctness will prevail?   Don’t know but we think it will be easy to slide from one to the other. 

By the way, Halloween is almost upon us - don't be surprised if those costumes are going to be in for a "values" discussion soon.