Welcome to your Monday open thread. Even though it’s Monday I’m still on a post-PPP high. Can you believe it? Dayum.
I’d rather have 24/7 coverage of this skater dude than the hateful Koran-burning pastor:
A planned Quran burning Saturday in Amarillo was thwarted by a 23-year-old carrying a skateboard and wearing a T-shirt with “I’m in Repent Amarillo No Joke” scrawled by hand on the back.
Jacob Isom, 23, grabbed David Grisham’s Quran when he became distracted while arguing with several residents at Sam Houston Park about the merits of burning the Islamic holy book.
“You’re just trying to start Holy Wars,” Isom said of Grisham after he gave the book to a religious leader from the Islamic Center of Amarillo.
Thanks news media for making Pastor Terry Jones, with a congregation of 50, into a worldwide name. You gave him exactly what he wanted – attention.
Check out these pictures from the 9/12 rally in DC. Those Tea Partiers are just regular folks who dream about armed revolution, amIright?
Mark Sumner at Daily Kos wrote an exceptional essay “Your rights should not be flat.”
None of these things should be read, as conservatives now seem prone to do, as a signal that we are too weak, too tolerant, too clingy when it comes to those old fashioned ideas of rights. “They do it too” has never been, and should not be, the standard for our behavior as individuals or as a nation. It’s not just a little thing called laws. It’s something simpler. We’re supposed to be better than that.
This nation wasn’t founded by people who conducted an international search for the least common denominator in morality. It wasn’t modeled after the ugliest, most restrictive, most brutal regime they could locate. Long before Reagan could appropriate the term, those who came to America (especially those who fled from some country where they didn’t have the freedom to build their own place of worship) looked to these shores as a site for that “city on a hill.”
All people are created equal. All laws are not. Our Constitution, with its guarantees of liberty enshrined as right, not privilege, is a proclamation of noble intent. It’s both inspirational and aspirational — something we should struggle to live up to every day, and a banner we should be proud to wave before the world. These are the rights we should want for everyone, not just ourselves. Only the same people who are the first to champion the cause of American exceptionalism, are crowding to the front of the line to attack the very things that make America exceptional.
Whether or not Saudi Arabia has Christian churches should not matter to so-called “Constitutional Conservatives” if they really believed in the Constitution.