Rudolf Otto and e.e.cummings?Holy Land Foundation sentencing, orto what level of tyranny can America progress?

“progress is a comfortable disease. . . .”

. . . .even progress into tyranny.

When I was in high school, the NCTE of Nebraska student writers competition rejected a poem of mine with the single note by a judge, “Plagiarized from e.e.cummings?” I had never heard of e.e.cummings. The judge did me a favor: my reading immediately progressed to e.e.cummings. My favorite e.e.cummings line is, “pity this busy monster manunkind not. Progress is a comfortable disease.”

This past week, without batting an eye, America has progressed from the comfort of terrorizing one group of Americans to tyrannizing another group of Americans. We have made a great leap forward in our progression into the fascist theocracy that even the greatest democracies are susceptible to becoming. And, as in other states that have progressed into fascist theocracies, hardly anyone noticed.

Last Tuesday, in the first instance, the self-righteousness of one religious group was institutionalized to tyrannize what should be (by both common sense and the Constitution) the religious freedom and personal morality of all other Americans. Because it happened in California, one might argue that the tyranny applies only to Californians, but the clichéd truth applies here: each of us is only as free as the most restrained of us.

Americans (the ones who are most sure they know "God’s will") seem to be willing with the stroke of a few judges’ pens to abdicate the very freedom of conscience that allows them to believe whatever cockamamie idea they hold about marriage—or any other religious issue. Tyranny seems, at least in some cases, to progress from tyranny: the religious community who did the most to insure that certain of our brother and sister Americans cannot marry, a triumph based on a myopic view of the history of marriage, are themselves members of a religion whose founder was lynched because he believed in polygamy, which most Americans thought was against God’s will. The Mormons have achieved parity for their loss of religious and personal freedom nearly two centuries ago.

The real tragedy is that those Californians (and other Americans) whose religious, personal, and moral freedom has been abrogated by an election campaign financed by Mormons largely from outside California have done nothing to join forces with and protect the religious, personal, and moral freedom of the other group whose lives were forever changed by another American tyranny this week. I have heard no outcry from the Human Rights Campaign, or Lambda Legal, or the California Courage Campaign against the tyrannical judgment of the United States District Court for North Texas in the case of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (or vice versa, I must be honest enough to add).

The leaders of the Holy Land Foundation were convicted last year of giving financial assistance to the “Specially Designated Terrorist” organization, Hamas, and sentenced Wednesday to prison for the rest of their lives. The Foundation was a legally constituted American religious organization that gave material support (mostly food and medical supplies) to the Palestinian people whose lives have been terrorized and tyrannized by the state of Israel since 1948 (and by Zionist settlers in their land for fifty years before that).

These men were convicted as part of a campaign to abrogate their religious and cultural rights controlled by forces not simply from outside their state, but from a foreign country. In an eerie similarity to the process whereby the Mormons influenced and controlled the voting against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons, the State of Israel influenced and controlled the arrest, trial, and conviction of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation.

Just as the Mormons and other fundamentalist Christians used the electoral process to abrogate my freedom to marry a man that I love, so the state of Israel used the American judicial system to abrogate the religious and political freedom of all Palestinians—my friends Shukri and Mufid and Mohamed who had escaped Israeli tyranny and had become Americans, as well as those who are clinging to their culture and religion in their homeland. And just as the Mormons progressed from their own persecution to inflict theocratic tyranny on one group of Americans, so has the state of Israel progressed from the persecution of the founders of the “Jewish State” during the Holocaust to inflict theocratic tyranny on another group of Americans.

These are hard words, and many people (thank God very few people will ever read them) would say I am anti-Mormon and/or anti-Semitic , or perhaps, just a crackpot, to write them. That would be because such people have no idea who I am.

But let us not worry “. . . progress is a comfortable disease.” Americans, above all else—even above their own freedom—value their comfort.
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