Jimmie over at The Sundries Shack makes an interesting point regarding the US Military’s guidelines about handling the Koran. It’s something worth discussing.
Now mind you, before you read this, I really have no problem with treating the Koran like a sacred book. It is what it is to billions of people and should be treated with respect regardless of the fact that the animals who distort it don’t.
After I finished this post about the “flushed Koran” story, a thought occurred to me. One aspect of the story we’ve heard a few times is that the Federal government has a two year-old policy on how our soldiers must handle the Koran. We’ve learned, thanks to a story on the policy yesterday in the Washington Post about some of the details of that policy – the main points being that there are a number of very special rules for handling a Koran, that it must be treated “like a fragile piece of delicate art”, and that no such policy exists for the most sacred book of any other religion.
That caused me to ask myself why our self-appointed First Amendment guardians aren’t all over this? Where are Barry Lynn and the ACLU and the other usual suspects?
I mean, it sure seems to me that a special set of rules that applies only to the Koran would seem like a pretty obvious violation of the First Amendment.
In fairness, First Amendment originalists like me would likely say that what the Pentagon has done doesn’t violate the First Amendment because it’s not actually Congress (you know, that whole “Congress shall make no law…” phrase). But that’s not been the way our courts have decided to interpret the Establishment clause in the past 30 years or so. In fact, our courts have maintained, as you well know, a fairly strict “wall” of separation between government at any level and religion of any sort. This policy doesn’t just crack down that wall, it kicks it down and strides pretty boldly right over it. The Pentagon’s policy isn’t just a slight lean toward favoring Islam. It’s a full-fledged legal protection of the Koran with the weight of the military judicial systen behind it – a system that has every bit the same pwer and authority of the civil court system.
That really got me thinking. While everyone handwrings over the event that never happened, no one is addressing the fact that the US Military even has in place a special set of guidelines for Koran handling. If the Separation of Church and State folks were really genuine in their concern about “theocracy,” then they should be all over this. A military policy guaranteed to protect a religious book and punish those who desecrate it?
Maybe they’re too busy trying to get “in God We Trust” off our money to notice what’s going on in the world. I don’t know. But one way or the other, this issue and what it has “outed” about the way we handle the Koran may very well put the intellectual honesty of these organizations to the test.
Think of it this way. What if the US military had a system in place where desecration of the bible were punishable by court marshall; do you think that would just “slip by” Americans United and all their other friends? If you’re intellectually honest, there’s no way you can say no.
Source: The Sundries Shack via Hube’s Cube