I missed this when it happened. Apparently this happened last year. Minneapolis changed the noise ordinance to allow the call to prayer (adhan) to be broadcast from the rooftops of mosques five times a day everyday. The residents of Minneapolis have to put up with this racket throughout the day now. Why? For the sake of religious freedom as understood by woke progressives. You know, the doctrine of “inclusion.” But that’s not what’s really going on. Progressives could give a shit about the religious liberty of the majority of the American population. This is an ideological project.
Doesn’t religious liberty necessarily entail freedom from the imposition of religion? Yes, it does. Assumed in the First Amendment is not just the freedom to believe, say, and write what one will, which includes the right to receive the beliefs, utterances, and writings of others, but also the freedom to not believe, speak, or write what one won’t—or hear or read what one won’t in the privacy of his home. If you’re in my house and I find your speech annoying or offensive I will ask you to stop talking or leave my house because you have no right to compel me to hear what I do not wish to hear. If you don’t leave, then I can have you removed. And I will. If you have a sign where you falsely claim to believe in science in your yard (you know “This house believes…”), I don’t have to look at it. If you put that sign in my yard, then there’s going to be trouble.
Religious tolerance only obliges me to allow you your beliefs and rituals as long as they don’t interfere with my liberty. This is the way freedom works. Believe what you will, but don’t force me to have to endure your beliefs.
Religious liberty means that a people are free from zealots shouting their calls for prayers at captive populations, which is the residents of this blue city are: a captives. How can the people enjoy their right to religious liberty when a religious call to prayer invades their spaces five times a day everyday? Is it not enough to suffer the mosques everywhere? To step around the ever growing number of supplicants on prayer cloths in school hallways, sidewalks, and roads? Can’t Muslims put an app on their phone that notifies them when it’s time to pray and then find some space to do it so that the rest of humanity doesn’t have to participate in their religious rituals? (What’s next? Arrows pointing to Mecca on every ceiling?) No, because then they wouldn’t get to pump their ideology into every home and business and every ear in Minneapolis.
Eventually this will be in your city. This is what the Islamization project looks like. This isn’t religious liberty. It’s religious imperialism. And your politicians will make it possible. Care to guess which party is the party that will make this happen in your city? Do I have to tell you? You know.
“Oh, but what about church bells?” You mean the melodious sound heard on the first Black Sabbath record? Like the sleepy sound of a distance train in the rain? You mean the sound of traditional Western culture that only occasionally appears on the aural landscape and then only locally and then only briefly? You know, the sound we don’t have to hear five times a day everyday through amplified systems broadcast to every ear in the city telling us that our culture is disintegrating? That sound? Spare me the false equivalencies.
freedom and reason 