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What is courage is to have a fatwah issued against you, to find out why, and then to sit down and talk through why the reasoning behind the fatwah is erroneous.

What is INSANE is that you actually (a) believe that ANYone should have a freaking FATWAH issued against him or her; and that (b) you think anyone would want to have "sit down and talk through" WHY people could be so UNcivilized as to presume to issue that fatway. You HAVE to be kidding, or else, you HAVE to be a fundamentalist muslim to rationalize such b.s. It's about as logical and rational as the Useless Nitwits expecting us to just keep talking and trying to 'understand' why the beasts who murdered our people on 9/11 did what they did.

The Christian coalition can have any damned meeting they want to among themselves. They can discuss anything they damned well want to among themselves. They STILL have a right to free speech while they STILL are Americans, protected by the Constitution that THEIR forefathers have died to preserve, which NONE of the muslims who NOW are whining about OUR freedom of religion have done. When THEY demonstrate THEIR respect for GENUINE freedom of religion in THEIR countries of origin, then let them DARE to tell a Jew or Christian in America what they can and cannot do.

did I say that I believe people should have fatwahs issued against him or her? no, I did not, yet you use this as the first debating point against my arguments. in a rebuttal, it is usually wisest to actually adress what the person said - not what you wish they had said so that you can reason through them more easily.

and yes, it is wisest to sit down and talk through those who would do something as clearly off the wall as issuing a fatwah. diplomacy is not an issue of weak-spinedness, although that is a false belief I see perpetrated again and again. there is a style of diplomacy known simply as 'cattle-prod' diplomacy. This means those who sit down and talk with the fatwah-issuers have a 'heart-attack' up their sleeves that they will reveal to no one else but the issuers. This is a tool that allows the issuers to understand the gravity of what they've done and the repercussions if they move forward with it. It's named after an old Italian technique of cattle-prodding someone discreetly in the armpit so that they believed they were having a heart attack. When used properly, this will convince the fatwah-issuers of the futility of their arguments, and most all of these fatwahs will be forgotten.

And in closing, I never attacked the Christian Coalition's first amendment rights - I simply made a suggestion of what they could do instead of what they were planning to do - last time I checked my making such a suggestion is protected by the first amendment just as much as their symposium power. And, just so you know, those were not THEIR forefathers - those were OUR forefathers - please do not exclude my American heritage in the future.