Waging a One-Man War on American Muslims

[rug]

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: December 16, 2011

During the mid-1990s, after hearing about the harassment of gay students, the principal of Largo High School in Florida created a support group for them. Over the next year or two, the meetings also drew sympathetic friends, evolving into a club called the Gay Straight Alliance. For a while, it operated in comfortable obscurity.

Then, in 1998, the principal, Barbara Thornton, began receiving postcards, many bearing the identical message bizarrely denouncing the alliance as a “government-funded witch hunt.” The local school board felt compelled to take up the issue, with 400 parents attending a meeting at which one speaker compared the gay students to murderers.

During that session, Ms. Thornton encountered the man who had manufactured the entire controversy: David Caton. An accountant turned rock-club owner, the author of a book about his pornography addiction, Mr. Caton had become a born-again Christian and the founder and sole employee of a fundamentalist group called the Florida Family Association.

This dispute, otherwise a mere footnote in America’s culture wars, matters very much right now. This same David Caton is the person who has maligned the television show “All-American Muslim” — a reality series on the Learning Channel about five families in Dearborn, Mich. — as a front for an Islamic takeover of America and pressured advertisers to pull their commercials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/us/on-religion-a-one-man-war-on-american-muslims.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

[darkstar3]

1. Stupidity like his being exposed and mocked is one of the quickest ways

to mitigate bigotry against Muslims.

"Oh shit, we don't sound like that guy, do we??"

Oh, look at that, religious beliefs we can mock...