This was posted by Kladner on Buzzflash— Starhawk, a writer, activist and prominent voice in Pagan spirituality comments on the political hysteria around plans to build an Islamic community center a few blocks away from the World Trade Center Site.
Paganism has been growing in the US since the 1970’s and Pagans have experienced misunderstanding and persecution by some of the same people who are making news by burning copies of the Koran– an act that only disgraces themselves.
Pagans know that when politics and public discourse descend to a hate-fest of blame and condemnation, we could be next. And as someone born Jewish just six years after the defeat of the Nazis, when you start burning books and demonizing religions, I start asking, “When will you be coming for me?”
Read the rest here, it’s brief and to the point.
I’m so glad to see Starhawk in the Washington Post. She opened my eyes to my own spirituality with her book, ‘Dreaming the Dark.’ She has a long career as an activist for human rights and environmental justice. I only wish that some of the religous and political leaders in the Christian faith would speak out as clearly for religious freedom and mutual respect. One Catholic bishop, one Evangelical minister, one Rabbi, one brave politician could do a great deal to bring us back to the angels of our better nature.
Kmareka.com 
When do pagans make demands on and threaten people who don’t accomodate them?Never that I’m aware of.Muslims have a religion that is not inwardly spiritual-they are always aggresive towards other faiths,and when they hold the political power that is an inseparable facet of their religion,they suppress all others.
You can whine all you want about tolerance and how I’m a meanie,but it seems to be true.Try leaving Islam if you’re born into it.Not very safe.Maybe your devotion to the rights of “womyn”is negotiable.In Islam you’d have no rights that your husband didn’t grant.Very orthodox Jews also treat women like something less than a full person,but stoning and “honor killings”aren’t on the menu there.The worst eems to be a form of shunning-traumatic,but survivable.
I ahd a friend many tears ago who was born Muslim in pakistan,but moved with her freethinking mother to the UK.She educated me pretty well on the disgusting attitude women endured in Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto got elected,but look what happened-she pissed off the mullahs,and they took her off the count.
One paradox of the Muslim world is that they had a female head of state, something that has not yet happened in the US.
There are Muslim women who courageously work for human rights. They are not abandoning their religion, but reforming it. How do we do right by all the Muslim people, in America and worldwide, who work for peace? Not by trashing their religion and giving justification to the most extreme.
I was raised Catholic, but I am a Unitarian Pagan. I was raised to believe that a wafer is the literal body of Christ. I no longer believe that, but I would not disrespect what someone else holds sacred. I respect the person. I would not burn anyone’s scripture, my sympathies are not with the book burners.
Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common for the crime of Quakerism. This is the persecution that sent Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to found Rhode Island.
There was one other Muslim female head of state-Prime Minister Megawati of Indonesia,but Indonesian Muslims(I’ve known a number of them)are generally a lot less militant than, let’s say, Saudis.
You’re some kind of idealist,aren’t you?Things aren’t changing and a few women(or men)aren’t going to reform Islam in our lifetimes,or ever,I’d say.
You have no problem trashing fundamentalist Christians all the time.I don’t believe much of anything they say,but I don’t waste time being angry at them.
You don’t use bad language,but your “tone” is hard to miss.
What is Unitarian Pagan?Seriously-don’t Unitarians believe in a single Creator?Pagans don’t have that as part of their beliefs,do they?
I have never been in a Unitarian church,nor heard a sermon there,so maybe they don’t believe in monotheism.
I just recall a Rev.Ahlburn around here some years back-very liberal guy always being interviewed on TV.I think he was Unitarian,but I don’t think he ever said much about that denomination.
I actually don’t care for fundamentalists of any religious persuasion-too self righteous in the sense that they know all the answers-what gives little dust motes like us the ability to know what the Creator really is?There is one,but the part can never understand the whole.
In a thousand years if they dig us all up they won’t know who was what anyway.
Cremation-the only sane answer-blow away in the breeze.
Oh,yeah-your local shopping guide is neat,but “me”is a reflexive pronoun and incorrect-it should be the possessive pronoun “mi”.