A Scandalously Bigoted Letter...

"If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran. ... I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States." - Excerpt from Virgil Goode's letter to supporters in Virginia's Congressional District #5

Beyond his public display of a loud and, some might say, tacky tie that placed an American flag over his crotch, US Congressional Representative Virgil Goode ( Virginia District 5 ) has come to be known for many things ; his steadfast support of the agendas of Christian right organizations, his asssociation with the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal and acceptance of questionable campaign donation money, his skill at channeling FEMA grants to volunteer fire departments, and his concern, shared with with US Representative Tom Tancredo and others, that the US is in danger of being overun by hordes of foreigners who might be "swarthy" or bilingual but who certainly would not be of white anglo-saxon Protestant derivation. While Tom Tancredo has warned of a Catholic "human wave" onslaught of Mexican immigrants threatening a Catholic take over of US culture and now frets over an alleged George W. Bush plot to merge the US with Canada and Mexico, Goode serves as patron saint for the Minuteman movement and both have co-sponsored anti-immigration legislation to erect a border fence between the US and Mexico.

As with Tom Tancredo, who has advocated that the US obliterate Mecca with nuclear bombs in the event of an Islamic terrorist attack on the US ( Tancredo is not alone in making such calls ), Virgil Goode is also partial to stoking anti-Islamic hatred and recently sent a letter to his constituents refering to US Representative Keith Ellison's desire to be sworn in using the Koran and warning that without anti-immigration legislation "we will have many more Muslims in the United States." Goode's letter has provoked a demand that Goode apologize from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. What's also worth noting is that some of Goode's constituents receiving the controversial letter may have also heard a recent hoax radio broadcast that elicited approval from listeners in the mid-Atlantic region for branding American Muslim citizens with identifying tattoos or forcing them to wear identifying armbands.

What The Hell Happened To Christianity ? -  asks Jay Bakker, son of ex-TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The question was rhetorical, no doubt, history suggests that Bakker's query misses the point : if the character of Christianity and Islam have changed in recent decades, those changes have reasons that are rooted, more than anything, in human history and politics. The rise of a cultural climate -  in which mainline Protestant churches break away to join African archbishops advocating anti-gay laws more draconian than those of pre=WW2 Nazi Germany, in which a game marketed to children lets them play at waging religious warfare on the streets of New York City and in which groups work to create parallel sectarian Christian organizational structures within the US Pentagon - did not come about by chance nor by infinite theologically oriented monkeys banging away randomly at infinite numbers of typwriters ; the cultural climate of aggressive American Christian nationalism has been, in large part, engineered - and, unless the champions of democratic pluralism recognize that fact and learn more about groups working to advance theocratic agendas and transform the United States into a Christian nation, Virgil Goode's letter in the end will be nothing more than another disturbing data point - perhaps useful for campaign ads and political attack lines - amidst an equally disturbing but mostly random jumble, noticed momentarily and then quickly forgotten.

[image, bottom: Thomas Nast's cartoons were not always bigoted]