The recent shooting at the awful Pamela Gellar's Drawing Mohammed "contest"--a deliberately inflammatory event if ever there was one--seems to have elicited a certain amount of debate regarding the issues in the title. Given the debate, I finally felt compelled to weigh in. If you're paying attention, then you know I don't blog much. It's a regrettable side-effect of having far too many hobbies for one's peace of mind, I'm afraid. So the fact that I felt it necessary to write this when I definitely should be cleaning the house should say something.
Gellar is reprehensible. Possessed by the burrowing mind-worm of the ultra-conservative dogma dominating a certain sector of society, she's either a con-man, like so many of them, or a true believer. If the latter, then I guarantee that she's guilty of an almost pathological fear of chaos. Carrying an innately authoritarian personality, she'd have a not-so-secret desire to be told exactly what to do, coupled with a perfect willingness to tell others what to do. Her faction would very much love to take away certain basic freedoms from the US citizen, including but not limited to the freedom to be Muslim, to worship as we please or not at all, to pursue knowledge unfettered by censorship, to seek one's own wisdom in true Gnostic or even agnostic fashion, to do with one's body as one pleases, to be healthy and secure. There is nothing I've heard about her or any of her ilk that makes me want to offer them respect that isn't outweighed by a hundred things that make me wish to withold it.
You can imagine my quandary when I find myself agreeing with them.
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