Christians Quicker to Irrational Anger than Muslims

Remember after 9/11 when a lot of conservative right wingers were talking about how Islam was a religion of hate, and that Muslims were quick to strike at any one who disagreed with them? Or even after the cartoon in the Netherlands when many Muslims protested and cried out against the paper publishing caricatures of Mohammed and Christians poked quiet fun at their overreaction to a cartoon?

Enter the cracker.

If you kept up with the Webster Cook stories you’ll love this piece from cnsnews.com. Though you wouldn’t know it had anything to do with Webster Cook if you read cnsnews’s version of the latest happenings.

Allison Aldrich, the credited writer for the piece, seems to be rather forgetful about many of the details, or more likely that she just didn’t do any research. She also seems to be making a few items up as well.

Quick back story, UCF student Webster Cook came under fire for not immediately consuming a communion wafer. Professor P.Z. Myers blogged about it stating that Catholics were overreacting, which was true. He stated on his blog that if anyone could get some consecrated wafers to him he would desecrate them with much fanfare. Then all hell broke loose including death threats, people losing their jobs, and thousands of bits of hateful speech flung from one side at the other.

Allison states in the article that Myers wrote on his July 8 blog that he pledged to “treat that silly book [the Koran] with disrespect” and pledged to desecrate the Eucharist, “which he referred to as ‘that *******d cracker.’”

Actually Allison we’re all adults here, he called it a goddamned cracker, grow up, it’s just a word. Besides, even according to Christians it would now be literally damned by god since it were desecrated I would think.

Further, in this thing called “journalism” most members of the press try to actually quote the subject correctly, rather than just make stuff up. I just read Myer’s July 8th post and maybe I missed it but I saw no reference to the Koran in that piece. Matter of fact I did follow the story fairly closely and as I recall it was Catholics who routinely brought up desecrating the Koran. The gist seemed to be that it was fine to desecrate others religious symbols but an unthinkable hate crime to do it to the Catholics’ cracker.

From what I can tell no research was done on the part of Aldrich for this piece. She starts quoting one Susan Fani, the Catholic League’s director of communications. Susan and Allison must have gotten along fabulously because they both seem to not know what they’re talking about.

Susan Fani, as well as other Catholics, tried to state that since Myers blog was linked to his page on the school website that Myers’ anti-religious speech broke the University’s code of conduct.

It did not. As a free citizen P.Z. Myers can say whatever the hell he wants, if he wants to call it a goddamned cracker and say that Catholics are a bunch of fuckwits that’s fine. It’s the same right you have to say that liberals should die, a sentiment Myers received often in emails from Catholics according to his site.

His blog was linked to his university website simply because his blog does deal with biology. He even has regular pieces that are only about biology on his site.

Had Myers said these things in class, to a roomful of students, then yes, that would be a breach of protocol. Free speech however is not a breach of anything. Are these concepts hard for other people or is it just the right wing that believes “agree or suffer”?

Allison went on to quote another apparent moron, Gary Cass, president of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. Gary thinks that the University of Minnesota (Morris), Myers employer, is agreeing with Myers actions since Minnesota (Morris) doesn’t, you know, burn him at the stake. Again, and please pay attention this time, it’s called freedom of speech, do you right wingers know anything about the constitution? I get that the president doesn’t but it doesn’t mean the rest of the nation shouldn’t.

Poor Gary goes on to say “What constructive result did this man achieve except demonstrating his own basic incivility?” Well Gary, what he did was expose Catholics as being a bunch of unreasonable, over dramatic, hate-filled, hypocritically bigoted followers of Jesus.

Myers got many death threats, over 12,000 hateful e-mails, and people calling for him to be fired. A priest compared Webster Cook’s actions to kidnapping, and a hate crime. It just got worse from there.

The church on the campus that this all started with has since filed claims against Webster Cook and his friend who was with him but had nothing to do with the original story. Last I’d heard neither of them could even register for fall classes at the school they’re paying to attend. Also, Cook was a member of the SGA at UCF, but impeachment processes have begun, all over a cracker. The Catholics have taken away these kids rights to an education over a cracker!

Allison also mentioned that Myers did desecrate the cracker and she stated that he nailed it to pages from the Koran. What Allison failed to mention was that Myers also nailed it to pages from Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” which many consider to be a seminal work in atheist literature. His point was that nothing was sacred and the point was good.

In the end it’s just paper with words on it and a bad cracker with an old nail thru it.

The amazing thing is that all this time we’ve been told how irrational Muslims are and that they get too worked up over little things. However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is not planning to take any actions against Myers according to a spokesman for CAIR. They’re not sending hate emails, there are no death or jihad threats, there are no Muslims calling for Myers dismissal. They simply ignored it as if it didn’t matter.

So let me see if I’ve got this, Muslims should be feared according to the right, because they’ll jihad you and what not. But, in this instance where their holy book was actually desecrated they shrugged it off merely calling Myers a publicity seeking bigot. Yet the loving, turn the other cheek, rational Christians went ape shit and acted like 5 year olds throwing a temper tantrum. But, when you live in a child’s fantasy world I guess you act like a child.