Comment to Defense of Bill Maher

As in most respects, particular circumstances exist within a larger context.  We still are, and certainly have been, the majority and dominant subculture here.  Thus every cultural strain of frustration, resentment, rebellion or anger focuses itself upon  and directs itself against, the central symbols of our identity.  Our superior position to this time at least still  allows us enough self-confidence to "take" and to tolerate it, and  we are able both to exhibit and to admire that magnanimity displayed in our doing so.  Our culture (religion: functionally one is the center, core, or point of origin of the other) has developed over centuries of its history, plural forms, diversity, which are characteristic of and  moral models of its highest ideals.   Consider the Act of Toleration of 1689, as the  "Whig" tradition emerged victorious, something I pretend to regret and in certain Romanticist moods, slightly do.  But I don't really believe any more in imprisoning Baptists or Quakers, or denying RC's suffrage.   The history of Islam has been to the present, quite the reverse, and it has remained intolerant and authoritarian, though in its flourishing periods in Damascus and then Baghdad, it was at least open to, then enthusiastic about, and finally imitative of and then superior to Byzantine, i.e., Christian/Greek/Western culture--at least with regard to the sciences, medicine and philosophy. Whence do you think St. Thomas got his methodology other than from Avicenna (ibn Sina) and Averroes (ibn Rushd), howevermuch they got theirs from Aristotle?  But, given the Crusades, the Saracen and then Turkish and almost Mongol conquests of the Middle East, and finally the economic-political-and cultural triumph of the Christian>secular/pluralistic, Modern>post-modern cultures, the Arabs reacted.  The authoritarian side of Islamic culture triumphed, and it has remained in many respects subservient, resentful, and intellectually narrow ever since, although now possibly redeemable because it has entered Western culture to some extent, particularly here in the USA.  Do we want to speak with ONE voice?  God help us, NO!!! although our authoritarian subculture, certainly growing stronger as we become increasingly insecure and resentful, e.g., Fundamentalists, the lower-middle-class South, Mormons (i.e., "Rednecks) consider that an ideal for which they strive.   I hardly think that Gay subculture has anything  to imitate in their example.