Liberty University graduate, Kevin Grantham,
a Colorado state senator, thinks mosques should
maybe be banned. (Courtesy of Colorado GOP)
The Western Conservative Summit invited Geert Wilders to its
third annual conference in Denver this year. Wilders is the Dutch parliamentarian who has made a name and a political career for himself with ferocious attacks on Muslim immigration to the Netherlands and what he labels Islamicization of Europe. His presence at the conference sparked Colorado state Sen. Kevin Grantham, a Republican representing Cañon City, to hint that Wilders' campaign to ban the construction of new mosques might be a good idea in the United States.
Head of the third fourth most popular political party in the Netherlands, Wilders spoke to a crowd of about a thousand at Colorado Christian University. The university's president is William L. Armstrong, once described during his two terms in office as the third most conservative senator in the United States. Wilders said he doesn't hate Muslims, just Islam. And while there are moderate Muslims, he added, there is no moderate Islam, but rather Islamic fascism:
If we do not stop the Islamization, we will lose everything: our identity, our culture, our democratic constitutional state, our freedom, and our civilization [...]
My view, in a nutshell, is that Islam, rather than a religion, is predominantly a totalitarian ideology striving for world dominance. I believe that Islam and freedom are incompatible.”
Wilders hyperventilated about alleged stealth efforts to install sharia law in the United States, but didn't raise one of his pet schemes: banning the Koran. For a guy who complains that Europe's strong hate-speech laws should be done away with and demands his own right to free speech be expanded, he has an interesting stance on other people's free speech rights.
Grantham was apparently spurred by the speech into the kind of thinking he learned at university:
[M]osques are not churches like we would think of churches,” Grantham said. “They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches — we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.”
Grantham is a 1992 graduate of Liberty University, where it is said the museum displays "3,000-year-old" dinosaur fossils. Liberty U was founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., the pro-segregation, pro-Apartheid, evangelist who also founded the Moral Majority, a powerful right-wing lobbying organization credited with prompting a strong voter turnout for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Falwell once called Islam "satanic." Among other controversies at the university, in 2009, the vice president for student affairs sent an email to the head of the campus Democrats, pulling the plug on the organization and barring its use of the university's name or facilities, a move later softened:
"The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine," Hine's e-mail stated, citing the party's positions on abortion and federal funding thereof, same-sex marriage, hate crimes, LGBT rights, and socialism as justification for the dissolution.
Oh yeah, Sen. Grantham, it's all about worship.