Burning the Koran

The current groundswell of criticism of the Florida pastor who intends to burn a Koran in
remembrance of the 9/11 attacks is worth examining in more than a “knee-jerk” way. While we
in a free society may have the right to such action I don’t believe it will have any favorable result
that we would be proud of. This eye for an eye, tit for tat approach is the sort of thing that
reinforces divides between people and cultures.

That said, it is interesting to provide some context of other “protests” against groups in recent
history. I saw a post today on a social networking site that talked of offending a billion Muslims
around the world most of whom had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Alternatively, the
equally large numbers of a billion Catholics are often confronted with desecration, and they’re
told to accept it. In 1987, artist Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix submerged in a glass of
his urine. He called it “Piss Christ.” Catholics aren’t known for responding with deadly fatwahs,
so there wasn’t a big negative reaction from government leaders or the media. In fact, the photo
won a visual arts contest sponsored by the government’s National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2004, shock artist Jerry Boyle was paid to create a sculpture for the campus of publicly funded
Washburn University in Kansas. It depicted a Catholic Bishop with a penis on his head in place
of a bishop’s miter. The university’s administration defended the blasphemy, as did the courts.

Multiculturalists proclaim that all cultures have equal value and thus deserve equal respect. In
our practice all cultures except the one put in place by our founders have advanced status leaving
our underlying values subject to a situational ethic. This situational ethic evaluates the likely
response to the “outrageous” act and responds accordingly.

It seems that the multicultural approach tends to suppress objective truth in a way that prevents
judging the relative merits of cultures and their impact on people and their societies. Thus, the
Muslim culture seems to be trapped in a thousand year old time warp of hardwired and
unbending repressive attitudes that allow no “meeting half-way” on anything. This attitudinal
difference causes our more temperate culture to shrink from any confrontation. As a result we
tend to give away our rights to free speech, etc. in an effort to “get along.” This is a craven act
of desecration to the many that have died over our history to defend those freedoms.

I hope that the Florida pastor shows some restraint and calls off his burning exercise. It certainly
is not going to add to world peace and harmony. However, neither did the attacking of the
World Trade Center in NYC add to world peace and harmony. In fact, they are vastly different
in scope and affect. If the pastor’s right to free speech is trampled on, we all have lost something
just as the Danes who caved in to the threats after the publication of the Mohamed cartoons in
the Danish newspaper.