On Sunday, I was playing bridge at a local tournament with my husband. The tournament was held at a private day school attached to a synagogue.
As usual, before the game started, I sat catching up on headlines from my RSS feed on my BlackBerry. I got to a story about Herman Cain's outrageous claim that communities can ban mosques. I stopped and related that to my husband, who acknowledged he had heard something of the sort. (He was equally disgusted.)
But there was someone else sitting at our table... a member of our bridge team-of-four for the day's event.
And this person interjected himself into our conversation. He asked, "You know what you have when you have four mosques?" and I, with some trepidation, replied, "No, what?" And the answer was, and this is verbatim, "Four ammunition dumps."
I did kind of a double take, as I paused briefly to see whether this was entirely serious. It was. I was absolutely appalled. And so I responded. I told him it was bullshit. And of course he said it isn't. And I said it was, and that he might as well accuse synagogues of being ammunition dumps, or Catholic churches.
So eventually, after some back and forth that confirmed he was being just as hateful as it sounded, I asked him if he was specifically anti-Muslim, and he said he was "extremely anti-Muslim." And at this point, he suggested that I not talk to him any further, if I wanted to have him on my team, and I said I thought not speaking to him was a great idea, and that we didn't need ever to play on the same team again. (We did complete the day's event without speaking to each other again.)
I continue to feel shocked at this evidence of extreme hatred with no apparent cause. As much as I dislike intolerance, I cannot tolerate this kind of bigotry. I have no doubt that I will continue to run into this man, but he will certainly never again plan on a team I'm associated with, and I won't hesitate to tell anyone who might ask why that is the case.
Thanks for listening!