There are a lot of ways to look at what happened with Terry Jones, the
pastor from Florida who wanted to burn the Qur’an on Saturday but later
thought better of it. We can accuse the media, as Jason Linkins does.
We can blame a frightening wave of anti-Islamic rhetoric and action,
enflamed by people whose political interests it serves. We can examine
the dynamics of a small church and a big world. But there's another
story here.
VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican on Wednesday (Sept. 8) joined Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other high-level U.S. officials in denouncing a Florida pastor's plans to burn the Quran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
A statement from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue called the Rev. Terry Jones' plan to burn up to 200 copies of the Quran on Saturday (Sept. 11) "an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community."
Outrage is pouring in from all sides — as
it should. Terry Jones is the kind of ”pastor” who gives clergy a bad
name; the kind of ”Christian” who affirms the worst suspicions of
skeptics and cynics. His plan to burn copies of the Qur’an on Saturday (September 11) is a stunt both feeble and horrifying.
I used to sit on the front porch with my grandmother, otherwise the
gentlest, most unconditionally loving person in my young life, while
she regaled me with stories about what was going on under the dome of
the Roman Catholic cathedral one block away. They're storing guns in
the basement, Grandma assured me, and I imagined that the windows in
the dome were gunports through which "they" planned to fire on the rest
of the city.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 54 percent of New York State voters agree "that because of American freedom of religion, Muslims have the right to build the mosque near Ground Zero." That strikes me as a shockingly small majority—almost half don’t feel that “religious freedom” by definition applies to all religions, even when the question’s put that way?—but hey, glad to hear of majority support for basic American principles, right?