At a town hall meeting Sunday afternoon in Anchorage, U.S. Senate campaign GOP nominee Joe Miller was asked a long question on how we should keep illegal immigrants out.

His short answer: “If East Germany can do it, we can do it!”

I have core differences of belief with the North Austin Muslim Community Center. Why then did I encourage my church, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church to make a special offering to help NAMCC build their Mosque? Why am I pictured in this video proudly presenting a check to them? Simply and clearly stated, there is a greater principle at stake.

I am weary to the bones of making statements protesting the brokers of intolerance in America. Their verbal AK 47’s are spraying out fear and falsehoods so quickly I become dizzy trying to decide which bullet to fend off…We have done enough talking. We have been on the defensive for too long. It is way past time to do something positively prophetic!

Massive Book-Burning Project Now Operating at Thousands of US Universities & Libraries — NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

For 28 weeks in late 2008 and 2009 I wrote a series on the Constitution. It grew out of a realization that while I knew a couple of the Amendments I had never really read the whole thing. Worse I had never taken the time to think about it in part and as a whole. If you’re interested you can find the last one here, and there are links to all 27 of the others. The point is not the series but what I learned from doing it.

There seems to be a failure by many of our fellow citizens to understand that the Constitution is not a Chinese Buffet where you can go straight for the sweet and sour chicken but leave off the bean sprouts. Our Constitution is more of a tapestry, where if you pull out one string that offends you the whole thing is weakened.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

If one wants the protections of a particular Amendment, then one has to support the whole thing. There is no getting around that. If you are a big fan of the idea that the State should not be able to view or seize your private papers and files, then it follows that you must support the 2nd Amendment and its provisions for the ownership of guns by private citizens.

Let me be clear from the start, the internment of 110,000 Japanese American citizens and residents is not exactly the same as the recent effort to stop the construction of mosques in Manhattan and elsewhere in the nation, but it is on the same spectrum, just like bigotry, prejudice and ethic hate are on the same spectrum.

It is one of our nation’s greatest shames that we interred our fellow citizens without any due process and merely because of their ethnicity. In the words of President Regan in the official apology was done in a fit of

“race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership”

.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

The conditions were shockingly similar to the ones that are driving the Radical Right to insist that a community center two blocks from the Trade Center Plaza (where the Twin Towers used to stand) is somehow a victory terrorists. Let’s try a little experiment, see if you can tell who said the following:

"A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched… So, a Muslim American born of Muslim parents, nurtured upon Muslim traditions, living in a transplanted Islamic atmosphere… notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Muslim, and not an American… Thus, while it might cause injustice to a few to treat them all as potential enemies, I cannot escape the conclusion… that such treatment… should be accorded to each and all of them while we are at war with their race

Nearly every oath of service in this nation includes the phrase “Defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America” in some form or the other. Not having a King we needed an object of loyalty, something bigger than the individual to focus our loyalty on. It was well planned by the Framers that when taking office each servant of the people would swear to uphold and protect the very document which created this nation.

It is therefore shocking how few of our fellow citizens actually get know or understand what the Constitution says. We have multiple issues where the public opinion seems to be against the Constitutions very clear demands for all citizens to have the same rights. The big culture war issue has been about the right of gay citizens to marry the person of their choice. Time and again the public has voted to deny this right to their fellow citizens.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Now with the help of the radical Republican propaganda machine the issue of citizens of the Islamic faith are under the same kind of pressure. The intent of a long time Manhattan Imam to build a large community center two blocks (Two New York City blocks, not the dinky things that you and I have in our neighborhoods) from the former site of the World Trade Center has lead to at least one on the radical Right to call for a ban on all mosque or Islamic community centers across the nation.

The dispute between Fareed Zakaria and Abe Foxman is not over. Foxman’s faux “shock” over Zakariah’s reaction to Foxman’s efforts to stop the building of an Islamic community center a few blocks from “ground zero” may be masking efforts by Foxman to have Zakaria exit by the same route as Helen Thomas and Octavia Nasr.

A couple of days ago someone pointed out that I had two differing views on a topic in the same post. It came from my need to give some credence to the ideas that disagree with mine, but it is not the only time I find myself in conflict with myself. Take the situation with the incredibly vile and to my mind utterly worthless members of Westboro Baptist Church. These are the malignant and maleficent idiots that protest at military funerals with signs that say such warm and fluffy things as “Semper Fi Fags” and “God Hates You”. They are protesting what they see as the over acceptance of homosexuality in America. They believe that God is punished the United States with 9/11 for our tolerance of our gay citizens.

This is where the conflict comes about. On the one hand they are out there protesting against people that I have lived with all my life. I was a kid actor; I basically grew up in a small professional kid’s repertory theater. There were gay and lesbian adults among our stage managers, our directors and our choreographers. There were gay kids in the troop. Even in the late 70’s and 80’s it was no big deal. They are and were good artists and performers and that mattered a hell of a lot more than whom they were dating or living with.

As egalitarian as things were inside that community it was not all peaches and cream. When Sid got the crap kicked out of him by some local skinhead punks, it came home to me how little tolerance the world had for some of the most important people in my life at that time. I am not proud of the fact that several of us went out and met violence with violence by kicking the crap out of that group of punks, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net

As the Supreme Court has now ruled that corporations (and unions) have the 1st Amendment right to provide unlimited funding for politicians, political campaigns and political issues, here’s a suggestion on Congress might respond.