:-(

If there’s one thing I find more distasteful than religion, it’s bigotry. I mean, both rank right up there with Pepsi, YouTube, and the entire catalog of The Eagles in terms of manmade atrocities. Global blight, stock your bunker, etc.

I know I’m far from alone in feeling surprised and appalled RE: the ever-devolving ground zero mosque situation. Every morning I scan the headlines and kill a thousand hobos in my thoughts.

I feel foolish that it’s taken me aback. I’m from the South, so I thought I was used to people scraping the soles of their shoes and calling it belief. My uncle uses the word nigger in e-mail forwards that he sends to his entire address book. I shake my fist at the computer every time I see it, but it’s sort of like objecting to death or taxes: there it is, no matter how bad you wish it were different.

Yet there is a difference, however superficial, between having dinner with my stupid bigot uncle and being at a party with an educated person who says there’s no such thing as racism in modern-day America. One has two heads and the other has two assholes, but in the final analysis they’re both scary freaks.

For me, this issue was thrown into relief a week or two ago during a friend’s birthday dinner, when a self-identified liberal member of our party held forth on her views on the controversial mosque.

“I don’t know if you know this about me,” she said, “but I worked at the World Trade Center.”

[Long pause for emphasis]

“So, you know, my feelings have been all over the place.”

Already, we had reached an impasse. A regular bigot is one thing, but a bigot who leverages a national tragedy as though it’s some sort of doctor’s excuse for her repulsive, cancerous hate? I’m not a fucking lawyer but I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of Latin-named logic mistake.

The conversation went downhill from there. This lady, a Jew, was talking about her Orthodox friend’s “menstruation tent” like it was totally normal, la-la-la, in one breath before denouncing all of Islam as backwards in the next.

I wanted to be like, hmm, sounds like your misogynist OCD nightmare god has an awful lot in common with the misogynist OCD nightmare god of your nemesis. Fetishizes virgins, gets mad when you eat stuff on certain days, prefers the devout dress like doofs, candlelight dinners, and walks on the beach, right? Now, if only you spent more time hating yourselves instead of each other, the world might be a better place.

But, you know, acquaintances. Bite your tongue and try not to gag on your $35 fish.

That dreadful experience helped me hone in on what has been perhaps the most upsetting aspect of this whole sick sorry affair, which has been the tone set by the people who should be fighting the good fight. Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama often couch their support of the mosque in terms of Constitutional rights, which frames the argument in a manner not unlike Newt Gingrich’s analogy of putting a “Nazi sign” next to DC’s Holocaust museum.

Yes, yes, they have the right. But here in America, historically, as surely even someone as limited as Newt Gingrich knows, “having the right” has approximately not-a-whole-lot to do with winning the battle of public opinion.

It hardly takes the cold stare of a heathen (i.e., me) to figure that Muslims didn’t fell the Twin Towers. And if you think for a minute the devil done blew them down, well, the devil’s also busy blowing up abortion clinics and singeing crosses and touching Catholic children where they shouldn’t be touched.

The NYT has filled its pages with reports on fears of Manhattan’s Muslims. It makes me wonder what a historian 100 years from now might make of it.

Most recently, we have General Petraeus’s reckless statement that those wannabe book-burning go-tards in Florida should hold off because the evil Muslims might murder American soldiers in the name of I-don’t-know-WTF, like, Middle Eastern Ray Bradbury?

Because, you know, the Taliban holds strict standards in terms of what news footage it uses for brainwashing purposes.

And even if what Gen. Petraeus said is true, which it almost certainly isn’t, what an irresponsible thing to say. Because (a) it perpetuates the conflation of Muslims and terrorists and (b) it makes that “pastor” and his “congregation” look like patriots if they back down. Which: no and no. NO!

The first rule is you don’t argue with crazy people. You can’t. It just makes them believe they have a side.