“That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some …”
— Future president James Madison, 1774.
Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering our country is, quite simply, just un-American, the antithesis of everything good and right about this land we all love. Religious freedom, after all, is a bedrock upon which this country was founded. Our sacred Constitution ensures that freedom.
Trump, the frontrunner of the GOP presidential field, is targeting Muslims. That’s a cowardly gut punch to all the good Muslims across this country, including ones who serve this community in so many ways, such as building houses for the poor and standing up for the wrongly convicted. In our long and glorious history, we’ve overcome often violent prejudice against Baptists, Quakers, Mormons, Jews and practitioners of Native American religions, just to name a few precious threads of our American quilt. We’ve also overcome violent attacks by people who twist Christianity and Islam. We’ll overcome Trump’s bigotry as well.
In the fullness of American time, his words that sound so loud and large today will recede into a dusty footnote, diminished by the biggest word on our shared page: FREEDOM.
