Hatred Knows No Boundaries

As the U.S. was building up a head of steam to go "kick a little Iraqi ass", I remember how many leaders on the European continent were cautioning then President Dum-dum NOT to do it. The French were particularly concerned with the ill-thought plan, and became the target for much scorn among the crowd that now is waving their tea bags and screaming that they don't want health insurance reform. We actually had members of Congress pressuring the folks in the Congressional cafeteria to rename French Fries to "Freedom" Fries (because that would hurt the French??)

The concerns of our European friends made sense for a lot of reasons... as we are now learning. But chiefly, these countries are ones that had been seeing an influx of immigrants, many of whom were Muslim, and it was putting their own social, economic, and humanity to the test. These folks don't look like us; they don't speak like us; and they don't pray like us. And in countries, such as France which used to be a colonial power in places such as Algeria, there have been very tense relations with the Islamic immigrant community. So any kicking of that ant hill was bound to have ripple effects felt much more closely in Europe than the United States.

Now, in a rare instance of "Well, at least this isn't us bull-headed Americans being the idiots", the Swiss have voted to ban minarets, the towers that arise from the domes on mosques in that country. They did not take a similar vote to remove all crosses from their churches. If you read about the campaign that was waged to pass this ugly legislation, you'll see the roots of racism and fear of "the other": ads showing a set of brown hands grabbing for a Swiss passport and minarets arising like missiles from the Swiss flag.

Many of the 6-percent of the Swiss Muslims are people who escaped to this supposedly-neutral country during the upheaval in Eastern Europe, particularly Yugoslavia, in the 1990s. According to the Associated Press, only one in ten of those Muslims practices their religion in this country of 7.5 million people. So clearly, we are talking about a minority within a minority. All the more reason to pass a constitutional ban on this iconic feature of their mosques, right?

Gay people, especially in Florida, can understand the feelings of Swiss muslims this morning. Nothing like being a minority group who must endure the tyranny of the majority voting on your personhood!

The Swiss have not only kicked an ant hill, they've done so with a bucket of honey poured on their shoe. And I imagine the rest of Europe is a little nervous about the fall-out from this prejudicial vote.

O God: Help! Help! Help!