Americans IDOLIZE Classical Values! ISLAMIC BIGOTS BACK OFF!
Here’s another reason we need to return to Classical Values; the latest horror in the Culture War is a diktat from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that America henceforth be referred to as a country founded upon “Judeo-Christian-Islamic values.”
Oh yeah?
There are 1.4 million Hindus in the United States.
American Indians practiced polytheism before, during, and after this country’s founding.
While various forms of the Christian religion predominated at the time of the founding, the founding fathers were well versed in Classical Values, and were quite careful to place no religious references in the Constitution other than a guarantee that the federal government neither establish religion nor interfere with it. The Constitution contains not a single reference to God; not even in the presidential oath of office. The phrase “under God” was not inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.
Hardly sounds to me like bedrock Judeo-Christian values, but even if some of the founders’ individual religious views influenced their political thinking, the assertion that “Islamic values” had anything to do with the founding of this country is preposterous.
Classical Values mean the right to be left alone in matters of religion. Neither religious compulsion nor religious intolerance. Rome’s religious tolerance allowed all gods to exist, and extended special tolerance to the Jewish faith until rebellions triggered a brutal Imperialist crackdown. Whether the Roman adoption of Imperialism was true to Classical Values is debatable, but few would dispute that democratic and republican principles — the very basis of this country’s founding, that we hold more dear than anything else — originated in ancient Greece and Rome.
Notwithstanding the obvious historic tensions which were to develop between Greco-Roman values and Judeo-Christian values, Islam (being later, and Medieval) had nothing to do with either.
Like the Romans before them, the founding fathers would have conceded the right of Muslims to practice their religion freely. But let them abuse that freedom and infringe the rights of others, well…
The Romans had a goddess called Justitia.
SO DO WE!
She holds the Scales of Justice and her statue adorns American courts.
Nothing Islamic about that!
What could very well be considered Islamic, of course, would be to blow up our statues of Justice!
The Romans would not have tolerated that, and neither should we!