A Pastor Responds to the Planned Koran Burning

Jonah Goldberg received a letter from a pastor friend that pretty much sums up my feelings about the Florida church that plans to burn Korans on 9/11:

Stipulated: Koran burning is moronic and, in my humble opinion, unChristian.

My question is: why is the act of a preacher with a 50 member congregation in Florida getting so much play? If you poke about a bit, I’m betting you can find a storefront church with a Facebook page (it’s free and has a simple user interface, you know; Twitter is harder to use) of that size and sort doing something mildly appalling almost every weekend. All over the south, and even in Youngstown, Ohio some Sundays.

They burn Barbies one weekend, pour out thirty year old whiskey the next (sniff), and cast demons out of mp3 players on another — burning Beatles albums is much harder than it used to be, and pushing a delete button on an iPod in the pulpit just doesn’t have the same visceral impact.

So as with every time Fred Phelps is called a “pastor,” I’m more than a little peeved that this clown is getting as much attention as he is. When he burns a stack of Danielle Steele novels next weekend, will we all be there? But since he figured out the locker combination of the media’s assumptions about evangelical Christians, he can steal their lunch now. If he burns a Book of Mormon to score points off the infidel Glenn Beck next week, are we going to see that across media platforms, too?

If the radical Muslim population of the world amounted to a handful of people this event wouldn't mean anything. But there are literally millions of Muslims who believe it's fully appropriate to lop off the head of anyone who does something they think is desecration of the Koran, or even for simply depicting their prophet in a drawing or picture as happened in the Danish cartoon situation.

And the threat is not isolated to one small part of the world.  The radical Islamists exist in nations all over the planet, including ours, and that's what makes this Florida stunt unnecessarily provocative.  It invites attacks on American interests worldwide.

While we should not allow radicals to inhibit our free speech, this is being done in the name of Christianity and will be used to tarnish and demean Christianity throughout the Islamic world.  This is another example, like the Ground Zero mosque, that just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.