In Defense of America 
By Tom Wilson

Not all cultures and religions value human life, dignity, and freedom, as highly as Americans do. We are identified by the high value we place on liberty for the individual, what our Founders called "liberty of conscience," every person's right freely to choose and act on what he believes.

The American colonies may have started each with its own particular religious chauvinism or sectarian turf, but by the time of the American Constitution, we fully realized that theocracy and democracy just don't mix. Our founders decided against establishing any official national religion, not because they were not religious (they were very religious), but because they knew that truth would excel only where men were not coerced to believe. In the free marketplace of ideas, with healthy and open dissent, un-oppressed by the de facto predominance of any mandated, establishment religion, truth would win.

It's very different in radical Islam: there are the included faithful and there are the excluded infidels, and the two cannot mix on equal terms. And Islamism is not just exclusionist (claiming to be the only path to paradise), it is supremacist, claiming a mandate to impose by force its paradise on the rest of us. Accommodation with non-Muslims is possible only if the infidels accept (with proper bowing and scraping) a second class, servitude status called "dhimmitude."
Whoopee.

This supremacist viewpoint produces a stark incompatibility between Western jurisprudence and Islamic jurisprudence or "sharia." To us, social justice starts with equal justice: we hold that all people, having been created in the image of God (whether recognized or not), are equal, and equally worthy of equal dignity. Not so in Islam. A dhimmi is not an equal. Islamic justice is profoundly non-equalitarian, tribal, an affair of religion, the domain of the local imam.

Can supremacist Islam and equalitarian democracy mix, meld, or even occupy the same ground? Here's a better question: just how important is our freedom to us? Or how important is liberty of conscience to me?- the right to freely believe, choose, and act without intimidation and coercion, without threats, implied or otherwise, from political or religious "correctness." Does the social contract, the consent of the governed, really matter? How honest is my religion, or even my non- religion, if I am forced to believe the things that I believe? How godly is a "God" who forces me to worship him?

We have believed that liberty of conscience was inalienably endowed to all men by God, which means that no one can take it from us, nor can it be voluntarily surrendered. God just hard wires people free; it's our obligation to Him and His to us. Why? Because God doesn't want robots; only a freeman can give an honest, critical consent or rejection to any political or religious government. So we are made free first, to decide issues about God, and then free to pursue the faith that we follow, even if it's just faith in ourselves. All "Heavens" imposed are hell.
 

Tom Wilson is the President of the Defenders Council of Vermont