Janet Parshall says something interesting...

Let's shift gears for a moment. While I was driving around town yesterday, I was listening to the radio. I'm quite the channel-flipper, and in the course of my jumps around the dial I lit on a local conservative Christian station that plays the radio show Janet Parshall's America. Ms. Parshall was giving some air time to recent remarks by President Obama that were targeted toward Muslims during their holy holiday of Ramadan. She would play each piece, following it up with the word interesting and expressing concern about the amount of deference given to Muslims on their holiday as opposed to that given to Christians on, say, the National Day of Prayer.

I listened hard to the clips of the President's remarks, deliberately looking for anything that I myself might find to be of concern. Whatever it was that was irking Ms. Parshall, I must have missed it. His words expressed tolerance and optimism for a better relationship with the Muslim world. While I don't count myself some fawning Obama fan, I think the man is doing the very best he can under the present circumstances. I like what he's saying so far.

One remark (paraphrased here) was especially interesting to me. Ms. Parshall asked: if we're going to give such glowing, extended coverage to Muslims, are we going to take the time to do the same for all of the other religions? One example she gave particularly stood out as a dig - Native Americans who smoke Peyote. Well, Ms. Parshall, I gladly concede to you this point, but I think that if you'd actually understood your own question you would never have posed it. You see, this is the very rationale behind keeping religion (as a body) out of the public arena; to incorporate one religious belief would, in the interest of fairness, necessitate the inclusion of every other, and the resulting time and effort spent to cover it all would be overwhelming. Take creationism, for example. If science teachers in the public schools were somehow legislated into giving so-called equal time to the Judeo-Christian creation story, it would only be fair that they also teach the creation stories of all of the other cultures that have them. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these. A single lesson would take the entire year to teach, and the class would become exclusively one in comparative religious studies rather than one in science. Therefore, in addition to the fact that they are not science anyway, creation stories are kept out of the science classroom to address precisely the problem you spoke of in your critique of President Obama's remarks.

This story lends itself very well to the point of this blog. Note, if you will, the following progressive sequence of statements:

• We need to end religion in the world.


• We need to end the negative influence of religion in the world.


• We need to end the negative influence of Christianity in the United States.


• We need to end the negative influence of Christian extremists like Janet Parshall in the United States.

Folks, I've never contested that we have a legitimate opponent standing in the way of the better world we seek. These people, who hide behind the shield and camouflage of their stated belief system, seek to impose unwelcome control over others, a state counter to the principles of liberty on which this country was founded. The above sequence of statements evolves from irrational generalization to rational, specific addressing of a tangible challenge. We certainly seem to grasp the true problem, but the words we say don't match the understanding we appear to have. What I am pointing out here is that we who are secular activists do ourselves and our efforts to keep these controlling people at bay a massive disservice when we publicly declare unrealistic, irrational goals (like the end of religion) and overgeneralize to the point of alienating potential allies. Why is this so hard to understand?

One more thing: following Ms. Parshall's analysis of the President's remarks, a female caller to the show made the following statement: Janet, I'm not very politically saavy, and that's why I listen to you.

Indeed, the most interesting statement of all.