It’s great that they’ve taken over the GOP and are in the process of destroying it.

The fact is you’re taking slim information on a slim minority of a specific religious group, and making very inaccurate generalizations from it. While it is true that some Muslims in the West remain in isolated communities, and some of those seek to live in ways that don’t conform with the civil rights of their new country, the very same true of some Christians (been to Colorado City, AZ recently, where rape of an adolescent girl is not a crime?) and some Jews, Hindus, etc., etc. Most religions have their extreme sects, and sooner or later the extremists plop down into a country that has (or pretends to have) a Bill of Rights or Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

For example, Canada struggled with the Sharia question and still may not have resolved it, although last year the province of Ontario decided that allowing the enforcement of Sharia law would violated the aforementioned federal Charter. I have never seen maha advocate anything in this blog that supports the violation of anyone’s civil liberties because they live in a religious community of any sort. I have only ever seen her write consistently with her comment #23 above.

Once again, I suggest you reread the quote that maha rightly called “bullshit,” as it clearly advocates racially/ethnically pure enclaves. Which, history has shown, leads to pogroms.

My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew who was forced out of Russian during a programme. I didn’t know my family had a Jewish background until I was in my early twenties even though my maiden name is Goldwater.

When I found out, I felt the weight of all that had been done against the Jews in Hitler’s Germany fall upon my shoulders and I wondered, since the family is now Protestant, if our being Protestant would have kept me from going to the gas chambers if I had lived at that time in that place. Thankfully I’ll never know the answer to that but sometimes the line seems very blurry between religiosity vs ethnicity.

Where I was coming from when I said what I did is from something I had read about Europe and how the Muslims live in segregation from the rest of the population and how the Europeans are ‘tolerant’ and ‘accepting’ of them to the point where no European court has jurisdiction over the Muslim community and would not dare to try and pass judgement upon them.
Europeans in various European countries are basically seen as not being xenophobes but they have forced the Muslims into ghettos and the Muslims there are not allowed to take any of the “good” jobs. I don’t want that kind of tolerance in America. Somebody HAS to make a judgement upon what is extreme and what isn’t at some point. I did not mean for my remarks to be taken as being totally in support of the rightie’s entire catcheism, or even that one part of it because I’m not.
Seeing more than one side of something and playing Devil’s Advocate can be a good thing because of the learning that can take place.
I just wish I had more faith in our government to keep out those that don’t, as you say, “get that” we will not tolerate certain behaviors.
Not everyone in America receives justice as you imply and we aren’t all equal under the law, although we should be.
My son got punched in the face when he was sixteen. We ended up rushing him to the emergency room where he had to have several thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery to reconstruct his face. We sued, but the judge found both boys to be equally at fault and dismissed the case. Later, when my son was in the military, someone in his unit threatened him. His commanding officer told him to stand down but he wouldn’t and I don’t blame him after what he had been through. He got kicked out of the service because of it. America is not a perfect place where everyone is treated equally nor should it be because things are not completely black or white. It isn’t equality under the law that I want, its justice.

As far as tolerating “extremism” is concerned — “extremism” often is a subjective judgment. At various times in the 19th century some groups of people went on rampages to burn Catholic churches and run Catholics out of their communities because they thought Catholics were “extreme,” for example. In the little town I grew up in, before I was born, several families of eastern European immigrants were hauled out of bed in the dead of night by a mob and forced out of town, and this was considered an acceptable thing to do because, the mob thought, “hunkies” are not like us. And don’t even get started about the atrocities committed against African Americans and native Americans because they weren’t sufficiently “judeo-christian,” among other things.

Lord knows there are huge numbers of people in this nation who think you and I are extreme.

I share with you concerns that extremist groups can undermine our nation and do great harm. My concern is one reason I write this blog, to expose them. But in America as long as people obey the law you cannot strip them of their civil liberty just because you are afraid of or disgusted by whatever group they belong to.

These examples you give are all about people who broke the law, meaning they are subject to penalty of law, and that’s as it should be. I don’t mind making immigrants aware in no uncertain terms that we do not tolerate bride burning or genital mutilation or revenge killing or many other practices that might have been tolerated where they came from. It’s clear the enormous majority of immigrants who come here get that, or the practices you cite would be a lot more common. In fact, some people come here to escape those practices.

So yes, it is certainly possible to make an absolute blanket statement “The first principle of a ‘free polity’ is respect of the civil liberties of every individual. When a community allows a majority faction to oppress a minority that is not freedom. It is tyranny.”

So long as you understand that respecting civil liberties doers NOT mean allowing anybody to break the law.

-me

I don’t have a problem with people who assimilate by going to public school and holding regular jobs, what I am referring to is strictly the “radical cliques”.
I have no problem with the Amish, the Mennonites, or any other religious group that is keeping to themselves - but then you don’t see those religious groups performing barbaric rituals on their girl children either as one Muslim recently tried to do here in America. I believe he was arrested for it and I’m glad because I don’t want to tolerate that kind of extremism.. I am very appreciative of his being brought to justice and I would hope that no ACLU lawyer would ever represent such a person in defense of his or her “civil rights” or “religious freedom”. There has to be a line between church and state, that’s all I’m trying to point out..

Another example would be for any Indian woman who wanted to throw herself on a funeral pyre here in America. Yes, of course, it is getting rare in India as well but it is still happening amongst extreme fundamentalists.
Is it too much to ask of a so-called tolerant group to attempt to understand the other sides’ point of view by reading something like the book While Europe Slept or the Rings of Allah or Christian Fascists?
All I am saying is that I don’t want to tolerate extremism of any form, ever, whether Muslim or Christian or whatever.

The “Stupid,” it must be applied evenly, and in large gobs.
I haven’t read anything this dumb since one of Bush’s speaches.

Like Noah’s son looking upon his nakedness: I must admit that when I first read that story in Genesis, I didn’t understand it at all. Is this a quote from Edmund Burke? Because today, seeing a parent of the same sex naked is no big deal. Who says there’s no progress?

If progress occurs at all, it is slow, unsteady and often obscure. Someone wisely observed that even those who want to bring back capital punishment aren’t trying to bring back drawing and quartering.

No right is more vital to the liberty of a people than the right of private property. That seems to be the unchanging essence of conservatism in this country. It was never true.

Bereft of order, liberty cannot exist. Well yeah. That’s why we liberals want to preserve the safety net; as Adlai Stevenson said, a hungry man is not a free man.

A State may legitimately claim the loyalty of its citizens or subjects. This claim, however, is far from absolute. Again, well, yeah. But people with different politics mean different things by that. So to ask a Republican if he or she agrees with that is meaningless.

A healthy polity will have a majority population and culture; contemporary orthodoxy on diversity tends towards anarchy and strife. Any society will have a common cultural framework, but it’s not true that there can be only two alternatives, uniformity and chaos. I’m told it’s mainly conservatives who like Tocqueville, but Tocqueville wrote eloquently about the tyranny of the majority.

Tradition and custom need not constantly explain or justify themselves as practice or policy. The presumption is in their favor. To drag them before the bar of a rigid rationalism is profound impiety. This is where we most disagree, I think. And segregated lunch counters are only the beginning of what this implicitly tolerates. How about slavery–that’s been the norm in most times and places.

And how about the confinement of women? The single thing for which I most thank feminists of the past is the freedom to come and go as I please. In some other times and places, “good” women were confined to the house and not even allowed to look out the window except perhaps from behind curtains or blinds. And if a woman was raped–God forbid–she was damaged goods; she had her pleasure, she must pay the price. Should the presumption be in favor of that?

Economics is a tool, which answers to other masters. We cannot use economics to articulate our picture of the good life any more than we can use biology to tell us why human life is sacred Amen. We progressives believe that too, at least about economics.

Voting is not a right but a privilege Beware! Anyone who says that _____ is a privilege and not a right wants to restrict it. What next? Return of the property requirement? Repeal of the 15th Amendment? Of the 19th Amendment? (N.B. The first President Bush, in a commencement address at the U. of Michigan, accused campus radicals of “abusing the privilege of free speech.” Like father, like son.)

In a republic, the Legislative Branch of government, being at once most representative and most deliberate, must be, if not supreme, at least primary over the other branches The good news: the authors are against the unitary executive theory. Are you listening, David Addington and John Yoo? The bad news: the authors seem to be against judicial review as well.

First, there is a long-standing tradition in this country of allowing people to live in religious communities separate from the secular culture. The Mennonites, Amish, many Orthodox Jewish communities, monasteries and convents of various types come to mind. As long as the people of these communities also follow the laws of their jurisdiction, they can keep themselves separate from the rest of the world all they like.

Second, here in New York and also New Jersey there is a substantial population of Muslims. The kids go to public school and the adults hold regular jobs. With the exception of one small radical clique in New Jersey a few years ago, there just isn’t a problem.

Of course, people who live in the U.S. have to live by the laws of the U.S., meaning that the more radical aspects of sharia law couldn’t be followed here, but some of the radical stuff couldn’t be followed in some of the more moderate Muslim countries, either. As long as they abide by our laws they enjoy equal protection under the laws, and that’s true of everyone, of every race, ethnic, and religious group.