Monday, January 08, 2007
No Muslims need apply?
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Sam G. Riley
Riley is a communications professor at Virginia Tech.
"Southwest Virginia is for haters" was the headline for a recent Christian Trejbal column in The Roanoke Times' Current section, distributed only in the New River Valley. Oh, brother, I thought when I read it. Trejbal is going to catch H-E-Jimminy for this one. And sure enough he did.
Just after Virginia's voters endorsed a constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriage and to discourage out-of-wedlock cohabitation, Trejbal, who didn't have the foresight to have been born in the South, stuck his non-Southern neck way out in order to make a strong point.
Virginians in general and people from our part of the commonwealth in particular, indicated Trejbal, are all too quick to disapprove of anyone who isn't just like them.
Those of us who were born and bred in the Southern briar patch might do better to admire Trejbal for his gutsiness than to pillory him. And we might as well admit that he had a point.
People everywhere fall victim to the "Everyone must be just like me fallacy." We do it at work, at play, in our politics and in our religious life.
The best Christians, and Muslims, try to avoid falling into this fallacy. The extremists, often those who make the biggest show of their religious beliefs, are usually the ones at fault. We Christians are told to love our fellow humans but we are quick to think that all those billions of people who practice other religions are doomed to spend eternity in Satan's celebrated winter resort.
Many Muslims are quick to return the favor. To them, non-Muslims are "the infidel." Muslim extremists would like to see infidels wiped out, but for every Muslim extremist, there are millions of decent, hard-working, family-loving Muslims who don't feel that way and, like most of us Christians, prefer peace.
What, then, are we to make of Rep. Virgil Goode's recent anti-Muslim tirade over comments made by a Minnesota congressman, who wished to be sworn in with his hand on the Quran rather than the Bible? Leaving out the matter of illegal immigration, let us consider just Goode's objection to this Muslim congressman being sworn in on the Quran.
Sadly, Goode's comments show that the late writer H.L. Mencken's "Boobus Americanus" is still a flourishing species. Does Goode not understand the religion clause of the First Amendment, or does he simply disagree with it? A third possible explanation is that he understands the amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion but wants to pander to those voters who don't.
Any way you look at it, what Goode did was, as we Southerners like to say, a "sorry sight." It was no better than the much-publicized slurs made recently by movie-maker Mel Gibson and comedian Michael Richards ("Kramer"). In a way, what Goode said was worse. Gibson and Richards are merely there to entertain us; Goode is supposed to represent us. Shame on him for letting us down and for refusing to apologize, but it must be admitted that ignorance or pandering to ignorance is sort of hard to apologize for.
Shame, also, on Goode's supporters who agree with him. Dare we say that their attitude toward the American guarantee of free religion smacks of the very hate that Trejbal described?
Of course, we Southwest Virginians really shouldn't be singled out. Americans in general -- we who are so fortunate to live in this richly blessed country -- too easily allow ourselves to be led by the nose to hate others who aren't just like us.
Years ago, I heard a story about a conversation among three chums. Updated, it would go like this:
"I hate them people from Iraq! I'm 100 percent Mur-can," says he first guy.
"Yeah," replies the second fellow. "I hate them people from Afghanistan. I'm 100 percent Mur-can," to which the third guy one-ups them with, "Well, I'm 300 percent Mur-can. I hate ever-damn body."
We Americans, and we Southwest Virginians, shouldn't hate too quickly. It makes us look small and often gets us in a heap of trouble.
