The attack that took place yesterday at Fort Hood was utterly horrifying, and Americans of all stripes are holding the victims of the violence in their thoughts and prayers.

That the perpetrator of the attack was deeply disturbed is obvious, but it’s also been widely reported that he is a practicing Muslim.

If he were a Christian, no one would use the incident to spread suspicion of Christians, but because of deeply ingrained cultural misunderstanding of Islam, some commentators are pushing the lie that Nidal Malik Hasan’s reprehensible actions should in some way reflect on all Muslims.

That’s absurd.

People For the American Way Foundation said as much today.

While the facts of the case are still being established, some commentators have latched onto the suspect’s name and religion and used them to impugn the characters of all Muslim Americans. That’s unacceptable. All Americans are united in condemning this violence, and it would be horrific if this incident was used to sow divisiveness and discord.

Our friends at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put out a press release that should have been entirely unnecessary, but which should clear up any lingering misconceptions:

We condemn this cowardly attack in the strongest terms possible and ask that the perpetrators be punished to the full extent of the law. No religious or political ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence. The attack was particularly heinous in that it targeted the all-volunteer army that protects our nation. American Muslims stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.

Yesterday’s shooting was a tragedy, and the proper response is sympathy for the heartbreaking ordeal the Fort Hood community is going through. Not intolerant attacks on fellow Americans.
 

Last week we mentioned the anti-Muslim witch hunt that some members of Congress wanted to start against, of all people, Congressional interns.

And yesterday People For President Michael B. Keegan wrote about the chilling resurgance of McCarthy-like tactics coming from the Right Wing.

But we'd be remiss in failing to point out another Congressman standing up for religious liberty and against anti-Muslim bigotry.  Representative Keith Ellison,  himself the first Muslim-American member of Congress, took to the floor of the House to read a statement from the Congressional Tri Caucus.  The statement made clear that people of all races and religions are welcome in the halls of Congress.

You can read the statement and watch a video of Rep. Ellison's remarks here.

Congressman Ellison and all the members of the Tri Caucus, we salute you!  Thanks for standing up for religious liberty for all.

Last week, four Congressmen, obviously concerned that they had so-far failed to plumb the depths of anti-Muslim bigotry, decided to demand an investigation into Muslim interns in Congress.  Their evidence?  A book published by World Net Daily, itself a monument to America's First Amendment protections for the ignorant and the morally bankrupt.

But before this story gets swept into the dustbin of political history, we should applaud some folks who stood up against the reckless, McCarthy-like accusations being leveled against young people who wanted to get engaged in the political process.

Per TMP, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez was first out of the gate in condemning the smear, followed by John Conyers and Andre Carson.

And, if you missed it, Rachel Maddow spoke out on the issue, appropriately slamming the group of Congressmen who decided that it would be politically expedient to fan the flames of religious strife.

So, while it's important to condemn elected leaders who exploit bigotry for political gain, it's important to applaud those who stand up to it.

Bravo!

People For the American Way Foundation’s Sharon Lettman will be on Rev. Byron Williams’ Radio Show on Blogtalkradio.com to discuss the African American Ministers Leadership Council and the work the organization does around civic participation, economic justice, equal justice, health care, and public education.  Tune in here at 1 pm EDT for the hour long show – and be sure to call-in with questions. 

Protesters from the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kanas - the "God Hates Fags" folks led by Fred Phelps - protested at Walt Whitman HIgh School in Bethesda, Maryland on Friday. Why? Well, for one thing, the school is named after someone who wasn't heterosexual. Isn't that reason enough?

According to the Potomac Almanac:

When Whitman sophomore Ryan Hauck first heard about the scheduled protest at Whitman from a friend he thought it was a joke. Then he went online — the church’s Web site is www.godhatesfags.com — and saw just how serious the church is.

"I was just shocked just from the second I heard it and I knew I had to do something," Hauck said. "[It was] the hatred of the whole thing that shocked me. It’s not disapproval, it's outright hatred. It’s not something you would expect from people who would consider themselves a church." ...

[To help Hauck,] sophomore Amar Mukunda set up a Facebook group to generate support for [a] counter-protest.

According to the Washington Post, more than 500 students came out to stand up against anti-gay hatred. And it wasn't just students who did the right thing:

[A]t Whitman, the protesters arrived to palpable excitement. Faculty had spun the event into an interdisciplinary lesson. English teachers spent the day on Whitman's verse. Social studies teachers led a unit on tolerance. Math teachers fanned through the crowd, attempting a head count.

I am heartened to see school faculty and students coming together against anti-gay bigotry. And I'm grateful to live in a country where the First Amendment protects the right of even the most hateful people to speak and worship as they please.

In Washington, we're hearing rumblings that the Right may be looking to start a fight over Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, whose confirmation hearing will be in early January. It's tough to imagine the kind of audacity it would take to challenge Holder's nomination after Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales.

After eight years of being dominated by politicization, cronyism and extremism, the Department of Justice is in desperate need of a good housecleaning. The Department, like the Attorney General, is supposed to defend the rule of law and Americans' constitutional rights. But under the Bush administration, the DOJ has been used as a weapon against constitutional values, used to fight the administration's ideological and political battles.

In the wake of 9/11, John Ashcroft's Justice Department led the Bush administration's relentless assault on civil liberties. The DOJ was on the forefront of the draconian expansion of surveillance and police powers, and contributed heavily to post-9/11 era of extreme government secrecy. Career lawyers at the DOJ were subtly -- and not so subtly -- pushed out in favor of attorneys more politically and ideologically aligned with the administration. The Civil Rights Division was completely politicized and instead of using its resources to protect voters' rights (by enforcing the Voting Rights Act among other things), the DOJ waged an attack on voting rights by supporting disenfranchising policies like Georgia's restrictive voter ID law. The Department also exploited the 'widespread voter fraud' myth for politically motivated witch hunts -- part of a larger trend of selectively targeting political and ideological opponents for investigation and prosecution.

And how can we forget the Gonzales era at the DOJ! The Attorney General is supposed to be the people's lawyer, but Gonzales was more the president's bag man. The problems that existed under Ashcroft continued or got worse. As more and more news came out about the NSA's illegal warrantless spying on Americans, the torture of U.S. detainees, legally questionable military tribunals and other subversions of the rule of law, we found out that the DOJ had expressly signed off on these administration policies and in some cases even supplied the legal and intellectual underpinning out of the Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). And when a scandal broke over the firing of U.S. attorneys, it became clear exactly how politically motivated hiring and firing practices had been at the DOJ, which evidently was staffed with a disproportionate number of graduates of Pat Robertson's law school (including one of the people tasked with the hiring/firing)!

Attorney General Mukasey has been arguably better than his two predecessors, but following the records of Ashcroft and Gonzales, that's not very hard. Eric Holder is a stellar choice: smart, capable and able to lead the DOJ in a new direction. But he will have his work cut out for him and he'll need help from people like you and me. First, we need to make sure he's confirmed, and that could mean a campaign to defeat whatever attacks right-wing senators throw at him. Then, because of the politically skewed hiring practices, he's going to need the support of the people to make dramatic changes at one of the government's most important agencies.

For eight years, the Department of Justice -- a government agency with a rich history of enforcing civil rights and the rule of law -- has served the worst ideological and partisan impulses of the Bush administration. The era of overzealous ideologues and partisans like Ashcroft and Gonzales is coming to an end.

Thank goodness.

But now it's time to dig in our heels and do our part to put the justice back in the Department of Justice. I hope you don't mind if I call on you for help in the coming months.

The nature of jurisprudence is that big issues can be settled over small fights. Hence, at the Supreme Court today, the tiny Summum Church was arguing about whether religious monuments in public parks constitute private or government speech.

Adam Liptak at The New York Times covered the case earlier this week, and Nina Totenberg had a story on NPR this morning.

Although not at question in the case, one of the most interesting aspects is the Summum religion itself.

Su Menu, the church’s president, agreed. “If you look at them side by side,” Ms. Menu said of the two monuments, “they really are saying similar things.”

The Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

The Third Aphorism: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

Now that’s religious diversity.

In all the effort to defend Barack Obama against the rumor that he’s secretly a Muslim, too may people have missed the real point. Why would it matter if he were a Muslim? The Constitution clearly states that ”no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” but the anti-Muslim smear is usually only addressed as an afterthought, with a Sienfeld-esque “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

In his interview on Meet the Press, Colin Powell elegantly swats down the rumor that Obama is a Muslim, without taking his eye off the real issue.

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.”

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.

Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards -- Purple Heart, Bronze Star -- showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.

And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross; it didn’t have the Star of David; it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.

A good reminder that the “correct answer” isn’t always the same as the “really right answer.”

Yesterday, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that rejects the latest efforts by the far right to undermine religious liberty in that state and pave the way for the return of a state voucher program. Just a few hours after hearing oral argument, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously held that two proposed state constitutional amendments that would undermine religious freedom and overturn the Court's ruling a few years ago striking down the state's publicly-funded school voucher program cannot be placed on the November ballot.

As soon as news broke last Friday that Senator John McCain had chosen the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, a media scramble began to find out more about her. In the brief period since then, one of the most concerning things to come to light about someone who holds public office and aspires to higher office is her belief that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public school science classes. As Palin has put it, "let kids debate both sides." This is a regurgitation of the right wing's "teach the debate" campaign. On the face of it, it sounds sort of benign, doesn't it? Give kids more information, let them decide? What could be wrong with that?