Red state values

44% in poll OK limits on rights of Muslims:

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

Ahh, those good old red state values.

I suppose I shouldn't be shocked by this. These poor saps are, after all, fed a daily diet of Fox News and have spent most of the past year tracking the Scott Peterson trial as if it mattered to their lives.

The so-called "Christian Right" is neither. It is not okay to limit the civil rights of some simply because of their religious beliefs, the color of their skin, or their country of origin. Civil rights are, by definition, the rights of all citizens, not a select few.

The survey indicated that 27 percent of the respondents said they supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register their home address with the federal government.

So, to 27 percent of the nation, being Muslim is akin to being a sex offender?

I wonder when will the administration announce their version of Kristallnacht against the Muslim community? Will they round up all the Muslims and put them in concentration camps the way the Roosevelt administration rounded up all those of Japanese descent during WWII?

Geof Stone ran a series of articles as a guest blogger for the Lessig Blog on the topic of (curtailing of) civil liberties during times of war.

The United States has a long and consistent pattern of unduly restricting civil liberties in time of war. Time after time, we have panicked in the face of war fever. We have lashed out at those we fear and allowed ourselves to be manipulated by opportunistic and exploitative politicians. We did this in 1798, when we enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, during the Civil War when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, during World War I when the nation brutally suppressed all criticism of the war and the draft, during World War II when we interned 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, during the Cold War when we humiliated, abused and silenced tens of thousands of individuals for their political beliefs and associations, and during the Vietnam War when the government engaged in an aggressive program of surveillance, infiltration, and surreptitious harassment designed to "exposre, disrupt, and neutralize" antiwar dissent.

I would highly recommend giving the series a read. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.