Orson Scott Card makes an excellent point about our absurd toleration of the intolerable when it comes to Islam's more outrageous beliefs (and I assure you he will get irate hate mail from San Francisco on this one):
It is time for Islam to join the civilized world -- the world where people can preach for and believe in and join with, argue against and doubt and quit any religion they want. Freedom of religion is a recent and hard-won concept, so it would be absurd to criticize Islam for being a few hundred years behind the West on this issue.
However, the time has come, with people committing barbaric crimes around the world in the name of the Muslim right-to-kill doctrine, for the peaceful majority of Muslims to commit to their opposition to that doctrine -- and to organize themselves so that they can excommunicate (disqualify as Muslims) any Muslim who does not reject that teaching.
Up to now, the only way that Muslims could kick a Muslim out of the Muslim faith was to kill him. It's time for them to set up an authoritative mechanism to allows them to excommunicate those who make all Muslims look barbaric.
Then, when Muslims themselves are able to excommunicate the barbarians and forbid them to call themselves legitimate Muslims, the religion of Islam can be accepted and trusted as another civilized religion, worthy of the protections of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, however, it is time for is to stop extending the protection of the Constitution to those who, under the guise of religion, are actively promoting the right to deprive Americans of their civil rights -- including the right to continue breathing.
Quite true. Our anti-religion Left seems to have a bizarre tolerance for one religion's crimes, excusing them out of cultural sensitivity and probably a good dose of guilt over our imaginary crimes (as if even actual Western crimes would somehow excuse the anti-Gay, anti-freedom, and anti-women actions of the jihadi faithful).
This strikes me as the equivalent of the British actions against Hindu practices that ran counter to their rule of law, as related by Mark Steyn:
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
Of course, we'd probably have to replace "tie a rope around their necks and we hang them" with "provide them with an attorney and tie up the courts for a decade until we put them in a comfy prison for life until the ACLU gets the lads out on a tecnnicality". That isn't nearly as impressive, I suppose.
But it would be helpful to deny religious status for the purposes of our tax laws to mosques that preach the killing of ex-Moslems or other violent actions. It would help if our feminists would work up the same outrage over Islam's anti-women tenets as they do over stray comments by Harvard University presidents. My fear is that our society won't stand up for this battle.
My hope is that American Moslems will eventually fight this battle on their own. I see in my own town Moslem women driving minivans. This is something that the Wahhabis would consider a stoning offense--for both the woman and the husband who allowed his wife to drive.
Perhaps based on an accumulation of such ordinary actions, our Moslems will in time formally renounce the vision of a desert-based, expansionist, cruel, and rigid Islam and forge a new American Islam compatible with suburban living that really will coexist in peace with other religions.
