The conservative strawman is flesh and bone

I love reading conservative writing. I love listening to conservative talk radio. Christian talk radio is the cats pajamas, especially when they're talking about the homosexual agenda/lifestyle/infant-fucking. It gets me going but good. It's a righteous, full feeling of anger and fascination that I don't get from reading blogs I agree with. My gf sometimes worries I'll become an ex-gay and leave her. I promise I won't.

However, these media sources can cross the line, even for a junkie like me. And The Conservative Voice did so on August 1, 2006. A letter to the editor called "Can a good Muslim be a good American?" cautions us to "be very mindful of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both "good" Muslims and good Americans...The religious war is bigger than we know or understand." And here I thought we were stepping away from eliminationist religious war rhetoric. So disappointing.

I try to read charitably. But the ignorance of this letter astounds me. It refers to Allah as the "moon God of Arabia." It states that Muslims are forced to marry and beat four wives. And it slaps you in the face at the end by invoking the righteous cause of religious war. The vision of this article is one in which America is an entirely Christian nation, loyal to the cross, doing battle with heathen, wife-beating Islamists. And this terrifies me. This war, this mentality. It is a willful misunderstanding of an entire philosophical world view. And it is the prevailing worldview today.