Tonight in Phoenix, Arizona, a group of religious racists are holding a “Muhammad Drawing Cartoon Contest” outside the Phoenix Islamic Community Center, a mosque that was once attended by Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, the two men who attacked a similar event in Garland, Texas earlier this month. Organizers of tonight’s event claim they’re merely exercising their First Amendment rights, but the planned blasphemous cartoon-drawing contest is really no different from the hate-filled protests members of the Westboro Baptist Church regularly hold at military funerals around the country.
Yes, both groups have a constitutional right to voice the ideas they are attempting to spread, but make no mistake, the ideas they are peddling have no redeeming social value. There is no virtue in purposely offending the sensibilities of another human being simply because you can. There is nothing admirable about the denigration and desecration of another individual’s religious beliefs. There is no value in perpetrating hatred beyond the recruitment of additional hating souls.
Why, then, do men flock to hatred like vultures to a carrion feast? Hate doesn’t create; it tears down. Hate doesn’t achieve; it destroys. Hate doesn’t seek the greater angels in a man’s soul; it seeks the lowest demons in the darkest corners of a man’s heart.
I wonder how tonight’s Phoenix cartoonists (and I use that term loosely – no offense to real cartoonists) would feel about a pissing on the American flag contest to see who could urinate on the American flag the longest (biggest bladder wins)? How about holding a dog defecation contest using a statute of Jesus, or a cross, as a contest prop? Both of those suggestions would be the equivalent of this evening’s planned event, and I have a hard time imagining the folks in Arizona would approve of those types of hate-filled messages.
Let’s hope nobody turns out tonight at the Phoenix event and that no violence occurs. I was going to use the word “pray,” but I don’t want to get shot.
