"American Taliban"?

KOS's equation, Christian right = Taliban, seems less hyperbolic the more I think about it.

American Atheists, under threats, has taken down some billboards denouncing Mormonism and Christianity it had set up near the site of the coming Democratic National Convention, one supposes from the usual scum of good Christians.

They say they would have toughed it out but the billboard company and its employees were threatened, too, and they weren't game.

A minor blip in the news media that had at first reported the billboards, only briefly, pretty much in their normal way of regarding atheism as an affront to American values and were then far from shocked or filled with regret at this development.

What would have happened if the threats had come from Muslims?

You know as well as I.

A nationwide media earthquake.

And we would still be hearing from the Republican clericalists like Newt and Rick and the rest that Obama and the Justice Department are soft of Islam and maybe even sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jihad Watch and the other Islamophobe websites would be going wild.

The demands for urgent federal action against domestic Muslim terrorism would be deafening from all quarters of the right wing noise machine.

Not a peep, though, about this incident.

And it was common as good American dirt, too.

Muslim terrorism in America, rare as hen's teeth, always gets tremendous press coverage.

Not so the much more common, one might almost say everyday, Christian kind.

All my life, the hatred of nearly all Christian Americans toward atheists has been as open, if not as strong or as violent, as white hatred for non-whites.

I have seen it every time someone, in early days usually someone associated with the O'Hairs and American Atheists, sought to put a stop to Bible thumping or prayer in some public school, or protested the exclusion of evolution from the teaching of biology or, perhaps worse, the inclusion of the Biblical creation myth.

Wikipedia says the founding matron, Madelyn Murray O'Hair, was dubbed the most hated woman in America by Time in 1964, primarily for her efforts to take the public schools out of the hands of the clergy.

That hatred has never gone away and never really diminished.

All my life, it has been pretty much always the same people who loathed blacks, despised Jews, hated atheists, and thought homosexuals lower than the dirt on the soles of their shoes.

Still seems that way, doesn't it?