“How dare anyone attack Islam because they have every right to believe what they believe?” is a caricature, not a reasoned critique. It doesn’t reflect any liberals I know, let alone me.

So you don’t like being compared to a caricature? Join the club…asshole.

That Adventist will follow up by inviting you into the house, offering you a cup of tea and asking how you came up with those ideas.

Do the same with an advocate of Islam and you’ll get your nuts smashed before being cut off, you’ll have your tongue cut out, hot pokers shoved into every orofice.

Are you afraid of that person? When he shows up at your house with a 5’3″ guy with a 60 inch waist do you change the subject rather than invite him in?

Are yoi afraod tp te;; pme tjat Allah can kiss your ass? That’s an Islamophobe, pure and simple.

Suggest to your regressive liberal friends that they picket a mosque with signs proclaiming Allah to be a cross=dressing fag and see what happens. Ask them to send along selfies as long has they have the necessary appendages to do so.

Persuade one of them that there would be a fortune for the first person to re-write the Koran correcting such PC problems as gender neutrality. Then watch how fast they discover a latent Islamophobe tendency.
Considering how they react to real or imagined disrespect it is only sane and rational to be afraid of those folks.

Islam is in desperate need of a reformation movement. Encouraging that is what I would do. You won’t get it by playing nice and saying Islam is a wonderful peaceful religion. When I said Islam “promotes intolerance, misogyny and illiberal values” it was in reference to the non violent ones who you said are “just fine” if they don’t get in our face. Even the good ones are as bad as the worst christians. And sure there may be a handful of christians in the world today who are as bad as the Islamic terrorists, but are no where even close to the same problem. Wahabism has radicalized muslims for decades, and there are members of the Saudi royal family who have financed its export all over the world. In Europe, in Africa, in China and other parts of Asia. This is the root of much of the Islamic terror we see in the world today. The Saudis have unleashed this monster upon the world. The way to stop it is with policies that encourage a reformation movement in Islam. Hopefully a fast track reformation.

And when you include Christianity honestly, then you have to face the question of what you could possibly do about it. Because now you’re not talking about an abstract group, but talking about “reforming” most of your friends and family and acquaintances. What law do you pass to stamp out “illiberal values” and fairy tales about the nature of reality? And while religion promotes misogyny, it’s not the only source of it. We’re having a hell of a time stamping it out among non-believers as it is.

It’s not false equivalency to point out that there’s no outrage you can lay at Islam’s door that Christians haven’t also done. And you don’t have to go back centuries to the Crusades, either. Less than a century ago, Good Christian-Americans hung, burnt alive, and beheaded Blacks in the South, by the light of burning Christian crosses. The term “lynching” isn’t synonymous with “hanging”, as I thought; it’s any particularly gruesome mob murder, performed publicly with the specific purpose of instilling terror in a population.

There were Good Christian terrorists in America less than a century ago, and some of them are still alive today; and their descendants are determined to keep alive that “Southern Heritage”. A little humility, please.

C’mon, Buck. You can say that about any religion. Christianity gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition and justified slavery, Imperialism and laissez-faire capitalism. There is a supreme arrogance and viciousness to the mentality that says “I know how the universe got here, how it works, and you deserve to spend eternity in never-ending torture because you don’t agree with me.”

Religions don’t always carry out this threat, at least not all the time, but they have all been capable of it periodically during their history.

Dangerous ignorance like this should never be considered “just fine.”

I’d be a little skeptical of any term for liberals coined by conservatives. “How dare anyone attack Islam because they have every right to believe what they believe?” is a caricature, not a reasoned critique. It doesn’t reflect any liberals I know, let alone me.

I consider myself a liberal in the classic style, somebody who applies objectivity and rational analysis to problems. That’s why I have a huge problem with singling out “their Islam” as the “bad” religion, while giving “our” Christianity a free pass. It’s a matter of degree of fanaticism only; religion is religion (except maybe Unitarians). If you account for all of history and avoid selective memory, Christians have proven themselves as fully capable of horror and atrocity as any Muslim.

Sure, we find our culture superior to other cultures; it’s our culture, and it’s familiar. But if something like 1.6 billion Muslims are suffering under their religion, why haven’t they rejected it? Apparently because it works for them.

That’s not to say that criticism is off-limits, not by a long shot. But yeah, in fact, Muslims do have the same right to self-determination as any other people. We may hate their choices, and criticize them bitterly, but no liberal could argue in good conscience that they don’t have a right to their beliefs.

It’s also consistent with liberal values to expect Muslims, and any member of an extreme religious sect, to STFU and not try to impose their beliefs on others. Militant Islam is a problem, as much as militant Christianity. Both are just fine when they’re not in everybody’s face.

Islam is a fucked up religion, just as all religions are fucked up; except at this point in history, and in some of the more extreme variants, Islam is more fucked up than all the others just for the reasons you said.

But I think even you must agree that much of the Conservative pushback against Islam is not a justifiable reaction to the medieval barbarities of the more Jihadist strains of this religion, but a shameless attempt to mobilize the fear, hatred and ignorance of Western masses to a frenzy, purely for political reasons. And of course, with Conservatives, “political” is really another word for “economic”. This is more about taxes than it is about theism, more about revenue than religion.

It is a mark of true Liberalism that this distinction is understood. I am not a racist, but I am certainly a cultural chauvinist.