Americans
are themselves probably quite unlikely to notice, ask or even care what
world Islam and global Christianity might think as they look at these
things. Being so 'multiculturally sensitive' as we claim, the fact that
we self-righteously cause offense in this way is startling to behold.
Who
really cares what the neighbors will think ... unless that thinking
actually drives them to start doing something. But hey, what are the
odds that foreign people convinced America is rotten to the core would
feel entirely justified in destroying it?
Yet
we seem to care so much what the local neighbors will think -- if they
read the 10 Commandments -- that we can't allow them to be displayed in
public...
Doubtless, televised images of these arrests will go around the globe.
Doubtless America's most lethal enemies will watch them, nodding
knowingly. Doubtless, like the recent reports from the Episcopal
Church's appalling General Convention in Minneapolis, these pictures
will reinforce the conviction of radical Islamists that America is
rotten to the core, an easy pushover for those determined enough to
fight it.
Imagine, they might say, American cops manacling their own ministers;
imagine them dragging away an old lady of faith in a wheelchair under
an oxygen tent! Imagine these policemen being, in a sense, party to a
godless attack on one of the great treasures of all mankind - ten
tenets most humans affirm.
"They accuse us of intolerance," some of these Islamists will argue,
"but look how intolerant they themselves are. They are not even
prepared to tolerate the public display of what for over three
millennia have been the ground rules for human behavior and the
relationship between God and man."
And from near the end:
And this content made Mahatma Gandhi, a
Hindu, if you don't mind, cherish the Ten Commandments as the great
moral code for all humanity, including of course their acknowledgment
of the Creator.
This is not about the separation between church and state. Gandhi
wasn't a member of the church or synagogue, neither were the
Babylonians whose laws, written 1,700 years before Christ, including
much of what we affirm in the Ten Commandments, nor all those cultures
around the world, who through the ages would not countenance murder,
theft, lying and adultery either.