Freedom of Islam

The first item in today's Best of the Web is well worth reading, even if you've already read Sam Harris's piece in the LATimes. Taranto notes the bizarre insouciance to the gunpoint conversion of Steve Centanni and his cameraman to Islam while hostages to some Palestinian crazies, when a kid offering a prayer at a football game in the U.S. or a valedictorian statement of her faith in Christ at a graduation is an outrage.

It's actually not true, or not always true, that liberals don't take religion seriously. When the issue is, say, a student-led prayer at a high school football game, they take it very seriously. They're even willing to make a federal case out of it. Here is Justice John Paul Stevens in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000):

For many [students] . . . the choice between whether to attend these games or to risk facing a personally offensive religious ritual is in no practical sense an easy one. The Constitution, moreover, demands that the school may not force this difficult choice upon these students for "[i]t is a tenet of the First Amendment that the State cannot require one of its citizens to forfeit his or her rights and benefits as the price of resisting conformance to state-sponsored religious practice."

Even if we regard every high school student's decision to attend a home football game as purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship. For "the government may no more use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it may use more direct means."

Presumably the justices--even Scalia and Thomas, who dissented in Santa Fe--would also look askance at gunpoint conversions to Christianity, at least if conducted under color of state action. So far as we know, however, the issue has never come before the high court, for the simple reason that that isn't something American Christians do.

When I was the only Mormon kid in my grade schools and high school in Iowa and Illinois, it never occurred to me to object to a prayer at a public event like this. It always seemed a good thing that all of us Judeo-Christians and others who probably really didn't take religion all that seriously were willing to show good will through a prayer. If they'd had an atheist come up to denounce everybody's religions, he'd have had to have a police guard, I suppose, but that would have been because of his disagreeable and insulting attitude. The same would be true of a Christian or Jew who made a show of denouncing all but his own faith. The point was tolerance and respect. The point of cases like Santa Fe is the right of every crank to harass everybody else over his pet peeves.

Is it a coincidence that we didn't have notorious school shooting indicents back then that we've had since Columbine? We have the victimhood epidemic back then either.