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This Week In Crazy: A Down And Dirty ‘Squirmish’

This Week In Crazy: A Down And Dirty ‘Squirmish’

Did you know that you can measure your patriotism by the number of times you’ve seen 13 Hours? It’s true. If you haven’t seen 13 Hours yet, it means you hate America. 

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Michael Pitts

Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for a database tracking American citizens who are Muslim is proving to be a popular notion. South Carolina lawmaker Michael Pitts perhaps took a cue from The Donald when he proposed his own nasty legislation this week that would require all journalists in his state to be entered into a “registry.”

The “South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law” provides that the “Secretary of State’s Office shall create a registry for the registration of persons who qualify as a journalist,” meaning anyone “who in his professional capacity collects, writes, or distributes news or other current information for a media outlet.”

The Post and Courier writes that the bill has “virtually no chance of advancing but is meant to reflect a lawmaker’s personal political statement.”

Pitts told The Post and Courierhis bill is not a reaction to any news story featuring him and that he is “not a press hater.” Rather, it’s to stimulate discussion over how he sees Second Amendment rights being treated by the printed press and television news. He added that the bill is modeled directly after the “concealed weapons permitting law.”

“It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms,” Pitts said. “With this statement I’m talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o’clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership.”

Pitts, you’ll recall, is the same Palmetto lawmaker who fought like hell last summer to frustrate the effort to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. He did so primarily by introducing a host of amendments, some patently frivolous, in order to obstruct the passage of the bill that would lower the flag. The Daily Caller reported that Pitts also “stymied the debate over the bill by steering the conversation toward the ‘Trail of Tears’ and complications in his marriage, presented by his use of hearing aids.” And The State noted that, as another of his amendments got tossed out, he compared himself to General Robert E. Lee surrendering to Union forces at Appomattox.

While we’re discussing his record, it may interest readers to review what I wrote back in July:

Unsurprisingly, Pitts’ voting record aligns with a constellation of far-right positions. He is opposed to all legal abortion even in the case of incest or rape; he has sponsored a bill that would prohibit any local municipalities in the state from enacting or enforcing their own gun control laws; he opposes marriage equality and the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation in South Carolina’s anti-discrimination laws.

At least he’s consistent.

Next: Gary Cass

4. Gary Cass

Meet Gary Cass, founder of the disingenuously named Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, which also maintains the blog DefendChristians.org (a similarly sketchy moniker).

A writer for Patheos — one of the best online resources for those seeking reliable, reasoned writings about the world’s religions — once described Cass as “a sick individual — a little dumb, a lot dishonest, and hateful through and through,” and also a “pro-violence, pro-death guy who wants to kill a billion human beings.” That blogger was referring specifically to a piece Cass wrote in Sept. 2014, entitled “I’m Islamophobic, Are You?” which enjoined Christians to slaughter the global population of Muslims en masse.

This week, Cass is here to educate us on the Biblical underpinnings of our nation’s founding — specifically, he wants us to understand that all of our elected officials must be Christian men.

In a video released Wednesday, Cass insists that “we need a leader who is alive spiritually and who will lead in the fear of God” and also that the “biblical biological requirement for office is you must be male.” This is naturally owing to the fact that “God established man as the head of the woman and the woman as his helpmate,” and our roles in the family ought to find a mirror in our roles in society.

Cass’s brand of Christian extremism may be a step too far for most conservatives, but the notion that we are a Christian nation (or a “Judeo-Christian nation,” the shifty hedge more commonly heard on the campaign trail) isn’t a foreign one. It has remarkably insidious currency among GOP politicians, who have used their faith to bolster policy positions fighting legal abortion and marriage equality. And even a relatively moderate Christian Republican like John Kasich is guilty of making absurdly retrograde comments about “women’s roles.”

So Cass is “out there,” sure. Just not as far out there as we might like to believe.

Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch

Next: Fox News

3. Fox News

Ted Cruz devoted his closing statement in last week’s GOP debate to promoting the latest action movie from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen director Michael Bay — 13 Hours, a fictionalized retelling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were murdered. The cable network Fox News dutifully picked up where the senator left off, and has been promoting the film as part of their interminable project to shock more life into a scandal that they continue to hope will derail Hillary Clinton’s prospects.

Media Matterswrites:

In addition to using the movie to push the debunked “stand down order” myth, Fox has argued that Bay’s film could “pose a threat” to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Fox’s Andrea Tantaros argued, “if anyone sees this movie … and then goes on to vote for Hillary Clinton, they’re a criminal.” Prime-time host Megyn Kelly, during a segment that pushed multiple Benghazi myths, said the movie “reintroduces Benghazi as a potential campaign issue that cannot be helpful to Mrs. Clinton.”

The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple wrote on his blog Tuesday that, in their relentless (and dubious) reporting — nominally on the question of whether or not the film will influence the election — they are, in fact, transparently shilling for the film. Wemple distinguishes between the film and the book on which 13 Hours is based, which he has praised for digesting on-the-record testimony “into a format that explains a great deal, like how vulnerable Stevens and other State Department were at their Benghazi outpost and how CIA and State Department bureaucracy inhibited crisis decision-making.” The movie is another animal though, and Fox News is using its release as a pretext to inflame passions about Benghazi all over again.

“Fox News isn’t acting as a news organization, which reports events as they arise,” Wemple writes. “It’s acting as an advocacy organization, verily rooting for the movie to tilt the contemporary political debate.”

Media Matters was more pithy in their headline: “Fox Called Out For Abandoning Any Pretense As A News Organization.”

Next: Ted Nugent

2. Ted Nugent

Gun nut Ted Nugent all but suggested the president should be lynched. Oh, okay, I’m sorry — he only said that President Obama “should be tried for treason & hung. Our entire fkdup gvt [sic] must be cleansed asap.” In what court he should be tried, and by what means the “fkdup gvt” should be “cleansed,” he did not say. I’m guessing there would be a high demand for ammunition, though.

Nugent is incensed that, as he wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday, “[o]ur unholy rotten soulless criminal America destroying government killed 4 Americans in Banghazi. [sic]”

This is the same man who responded to events like the Sandy Hook massacre by insisting that the whole idea that innocent children were being gunned down was just a “Big Lie,” yet here repeats the thoroughly debunked conservative media myth that President Obama and/or then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a “stand down” order. The “stand down” order, like much of the conservative rhetoric on the subject of the Benghazi attack, does not align with reality, according to PolitiFact. Yet it does apparently make an appearance in 13 Hours, which, as I noted, conservative pols and pundits have been discussing and promulgating with the reverence they usually accord to Holy Writ (or the Second Amendment, minus the “well regulated” part).

Nugent always files his vile syndicated column from a reality of his own making: He has insisted that gun-free zones are “slaughter zones” that should be outlawed, and that living without a gun is an “irresponsible, suicidal choice that will get you killed.” So I suppose getting his gospel from the director of Armageddon isn’t a huge leap.

Hat tip Media Matters

Next: Sarah Palin

1. Sarah Palin

At the risk of giving her more attention than she deserves (which is to say, any at all), it cannot be denied that Sarah Palin is back in the limelight this week. And she has been in rare form.

After some mercifully quiet wanderings in the politico-media wilderness, the once (and perhaps future) VP candidate cannily re-entered the news cycle on Tuesday by hitching her wagon to the Trump train, in the form of a much-heralded, much-more-talked-about endorsement.

Palin’s enthusiastic (and often nonsensical) speech in support of The Donald has been the subject of much mockery, head-scratching, and literary analysis. Suffice it to say, the Hockey-Mom-in-Chief is in her element, playing some of her old ’08 hits (Remember “Drill, Baby, Drill”? How about “community organizer”?), as well as some new accidental coinages. (From the bard who brought you “refudiate,” here’s “squirmishes,” a new Palinism that she used to describe the conflict in the Middle East.)

The fact that the original Tea Party darling has wholeheartedly embraced a onetime registered Democrat from Gotham has baffled and aggravated pols and pundits of the Right, who still insist that Trump is a GOP interloper. But the truth is, their union is a meeting of the whatever-qualifies-as-their-minds: Palin’s and Trump’s brand of crazy transcends party affiliation and religion; it dissolves the cultural differences between the Big, Bad City and The Last Frontier; it’s a sad fraternity whose only criteria for admission are a thirst for violence and the cultivation of a loud, defiant ignorance.

And they’re here to stay.

—

Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr 

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

This Week In Crazy: No Sleep ‘Til Iowa

This Week In Crazy: No Sleep ‘Til Iowa

This fitful circus of folly we call the election cycle enters its next phase in two short weeks — when the first votes are actually cast. We’re in the pre-Iowa homestretch now, and everyone’s losing their minds. Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Village of Whitesboro, New York

The Iowa caucuses are two weeks away, and the general election isn’t until November. But according to Stephen Colbert “the most important vote of 2016” already occurred this week.

The village of Whitesboro, New York became the focus of national attention and derision held an opinion poll about whether to replace their controversial town seal. The seal appears to depict town founder Hugh White locked in a death match with a red-toned Native American.

whitesboro-seal

Click to enlarge

“Political correctness, who cares?” one voter told WKTV. “This is our village, who cares what the world thinks? I want to see this settled today, once and for all.”

Thankfully, the good people of Whitesboro would not be cowed into wussifying their own history, and voted to keep the seal.

What the alternative seals had in cultural sensitivity they lost is historical verisimilitude. One of the proposed replacement seals appeared to show the Native American and Mr. White teaming up to beat down a British redcoat; another seemed to illustrate them high-fiving.

So maybe kudos are in order that the folks of Whitesboro are refusing to whitewash history. I suppose I’m being generous, but we could say that the decision to keep the old seal is less about celebrating a racially-charged violent heritage — and more about just acknowledging that it happened at all… right? …Right?

Next: Fox & Friends

4. Fox & Friends

Count on Fox & Friends, the news network’s daily morning exercise in folksy, caffeinated inanity, to find fault in President Obama’s aspirational “moon shot” goal of curing cancer, which he trumpeted during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

The F&F gang must have tried heartily and failed to actually find an anti-cancer-cure angle to suit their purpose, so they instead settled for accusing the president of ripping his speech off from the liberal propaganda machine known as The West Wing.

Video from Media Matters below:

“If you’re going to rip off somebody,” host Clayton Morris said, “rip off Aaron Sorkin.”

Give F&F some credit. Since their mandate is to attack Obama for absolutely everything, they could have just as easily come out as “pro-cancer.” It wouldn’t even be the stupidest thing they’ve ever said.

Next: Michael Savage

3. Michael Savage

A few weeks ago Trump made a call-in appearance on paranoid savant Alex Jones’ InfoWars radio show. So of course it was only a matter of time before he put in a call to Jones’s shock-jock-in-arms and human interrobang Michael Savage, showing up on his Monday program.

Savage, you’ll recall, is the raucous fabulist famous for his deluded rants, in which he blames President Obama, whom he calls “this thing in the White House,” for literally everything in his life — whether it’s the imaginary American internment camps he espies around every corner; the urban, nonwhite  “Army of the Night” he thinks is coming to steal his liberty; or any of his various ailments such as a nasty flu or his “post radio stress disorder.”

And now, with his characteristic yen for fantasy, Savage told The Donald that he was quite confident he would sweep the Hispanic vote in America. The reasoning behind this is more than a little specious, and exhibits Savage’s characteristic flair for free-associative nonsense. Savage is convinced this will occur, despite Trump’s propensity for hateful anti-immigrant — specifically anti-Mexican — remarks, because “the Hispanic culture is a macho culture. Men don’t like reporting to a woman. It’s just the way the culture is. And they’d rather have a man than a woman as president.”

Per Media Matters:

Trump later added that he’s the one who “came up with” getting rid of “anchor babies” from the country, claiming that “people come over, they have a baby, now we have to take care of the baby for the next 90 years. It’s ridiculous.” The Associated Press noted that it’s “extraordinarily rare for immigrants to come to the U.S. just so they can have babies and get citizenship. In most cases, they come to the U.S. for economic reasons and better hospitals, and end up staying and raising families.”

Numerous polls have shown that Trump is actually extremely unpopular with Hispanics. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found “Trump’s favorability rating is just 18 percent among Hispanics and blacks alike, vs. 44 percent among whites.”

Never mind that, during the 2008 Democratic primary, Hispanic voters voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama nearly two-to-one. Savage’s grasp on reality is as strong as ever.

Next: Ann Coulter

2. Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter has emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most fearsome and adamant fangirls. His dubious conservative record on any number of issues, not to mention his past chumminess with the Clintons, appears not to be an issue for Coulter. His strident anti-immigrant stance is more than enough to win the shriveled venomous heart of a virulent xenophobe like Coulter.

As he increasingly comes under criticism (and under threat ) from people within his own party, Coulter has shown no compunction at all opening up her characteristic brand of fire-breathing B.S. on his behalf — even if it means going after other conservatives. This includes Ted Cruz, who’s poised to possibly beat Trump in the Iowa caucuses, and so of course Coulter has added her voice to the chorus of challenges to Cruz’s eligibility. And now she’s set her crosshairs on South Carolina governor and GOP rising star Nikki Haley.

Haley had been tapped by the GOP to give the party’s official rebuke to the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night. She used the opportunity to take some not-so-veiled swipes at Trump, for his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric. She invoked her own background as the daughter of immigrants and defended the notion that America is open to anyone willing to come here and work hard.

Earning the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike, Coulter tore Haley (and whatever laughable shred of her own credibility remained) to shreds:

And then for an encore, Coulter went on Fox News Radio and called Haley a “bimbo,” who “was accidentally elected because she’s pretty and isn’t very bright.”

Go home, Ann. Everyone is embarrassed for you.

Next: Mike Huckabee

1. Mike Huckabee.

It’s hard to be a sanctimonious, righteous Bible-thumping candidate for Christ when you have a noted child molester in your corner. But it doesn’t seem to bother Mike Huckabee.

The Southern Baptist preacher currently languishing in the polls is the anti-gay, anti-abortion crusader who purports to defend the sanctity of the American family; he’s also a noted apologist for serial sexual abuser Josh Duggar. On this point he was challenged on the campaign trail: “You talk about the children. What’s your views on child abuse?” a woman asked Huckabee at a Clinton, Iowa event last week, kicking off a long, tense exchange, which was captured on video and posted online by the progressive Super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century.

When the woman persisted, Huckabee said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know that family and I do.” Indeed he does. Huck has been one of the Duggars’ most vociferous defenders, coming to their aid when Josh’s crimes were revealed to the public last year.

Huckabee said that despite the Duggars’ efforts to keep Josh’s serial abuse of his sisters from reaching the authorities, “their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes” and that he and his wife would “run to them with our support.”

So yes, the same Mike Huckabee who said of the Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage equality, “Jesus wept,” also defended Josh Duggar’s crimes as “mistakes” that may have been “‘inexcusable, but that does not mean ‘unforgivable.'”

Josh Duggar, you’ll recall, is the former subject of TLC’s squeaky-clean reality show 19 Kids and Counting, which beamed his large, all-loving conservative Christian family into living rooms all over the nation. He’s also a former executive director for the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm, which advocates against marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights. In his capacity as FRC mouthpiece, Duggar said that same-sex marriage was an existential threat to the American family, and that homosexuality was linked to pedophilia.

But Huckabee protested that it wasn’t very nice of the woman to challenge him on his record, saying that being told he supports child abuse “hurts my feelings.”

I’m playing the world’s smallest violin.

Photo: Marc Nozell via Flickr

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

This Week In Crazy: Come, Armageddon

This Week In Crazy: Come, Armageddon

Despite prior warnings to this effect, which turned out to be premature, conservative right-wingers are quite sure that this time it really is the End Times.

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Kevin Swanson

2015-11-06-kevin-swanson-cow-manure-right-wing-watch-screen-grab-640So much has been made of pastor Kevin Swanson’s “kill-the-gays rally,” as Rachel Maddow aptly characterized it, that I almost hesitate to include him on this week’s list. But if a crazed man announcing that, were he invited to his gay son’s wedding, he’d “sit in cow manure” and “spread it all over my body” doesn’t make the TWIC page, then the TWIC page has no meaning.

Swanson’s epic caterwaul continues: “I’m not laughing! I’m grieving! I’m mourning!” He characterized gay people as being riddled with sores, and wailed that “People are carving happy faces on the sores! That’s not a nice thing to do! Don’t you dare carve happy faces on open, pussy sores!!”

This mewling, hysterical tantrum was part of Swanson’s protracted introduction of, improbably, three GOP presidential candidates — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal — who attended the Des Moines rally in an apparent demonstration that the Iowan evangelical vote is so valuable a candidate will stoop to even the most shameful low. (While onstage, Cruz insisted that atheists and nonreligious people were unfit to be president — to rapturous applause.)

While he explained that homosexuality was a capital offense, Swanson stopped short of saying civil leaders should actually be the ones sentencing them to death — but only because “we need some time for homosexuals to repent.”

Of course, the candidates’ campaigns are already backpedaling: Huckabee is now saying he didn’t know what he was getting into, a pretty dubious claim — considering the bevy of material on Swanson’s history of hateful anti-gay, anti-women rhetoric that’s readily available online, and the fact that media outlets and watchdog groups were making a lot of noise about this last week.

But Jesus never used Google, so apparently neither does Huck.

Next: Pat Robertson

4. Pat Robertson

PatRobertsonScreenshotPat Robertson, the ill-tempered wax sculpture who hosts The 700 Club, has some hard words for anyone who thinks they can be both gay and Christian at the same time. (Hint: you can’t.)

Taking a question from a viewer on that subject on his show Tuesday, Robertson said that any such person would be “misguided and a hypocrite,” calling the trend of gay-friendly churches “the last stage of Gentile world apostasy.”

The only churches worth a damn, in Robertson’s view, are the ones that look on miscarried babies as God’s deliverance from future Hitlers, treat anorexia like a case of demonic possession, or believe that marriage equality will lead to Christians being forced into sodomy. Such sensible dogma.

Of course, Mad Pat isn’t the only one who believes the End Times are upon us…

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Michele Bachmann

3. Michele Bachmann

Michele BachmannThe former congresswoman who recently blamed floods in South Carolina on the nuclear deal with Iran, is off on another one of End-Is-Nigh kicks, espying portents of Armageddon in every news clipping and slice of fresh toast she comes across. “It’s literally day by day by day,” she said. “We’re seeing the fulfillment of scripture right in front of our eyes, even while we’re on the ground.”

On a recent taping of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins’ Washington Watch radio show, she encouraged Christian Americans to get busy ticking off their pre-apocalypse bucket list, among which items, she said, should be the conversion of as many Jews as possible.

Per Right Wing Watch, Bachmann said that Christians “recognize the shortness of the hour,

and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Judge Scott Johansen

2. Judge Scott Johansen

Update below.

A Utah judge ordered Tuesday that the infant foster child of a married lesbian couple be removed and reassigned to a heterosexual couple. His decision was based entirely on the fact that the child’s foster parents were lesbian.

April Hoagland and Becky Peirce have been raising the child for the last three months, along with Peirce’s 12- and 14-year-old children, and they are joined in support by both the foster child’s state-appointed attorney and her biological mother, who does not wish to see the family broken up.

From KUTV:

The women, who are legally married and were approved as foster parents in Utah earlier this year after passing home inspections, background checks and interviews from DCFS [Utah Division of Child and Family Services], said the judge told them there was a lot of research that indicated children who are raised in same-sex parent homes do not do as well as children who are raised by heterosexual parents.

Judge Scott Johansen apparently did not actually name or cite the vague research on which he based his decision, and because this is a family court ruling, the court records have not been released. The New Civil Rights Movement notes that there is “no valid research that proves children raised by same-sex parents do not perform as well as children raise by different-sex parents,” and that the “most widely publicized study that claimed to show adult children raised by same-sex parents, authored by Mark Regnerus, has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community.”

Johansen is same juvenile court judge who dispensed some eye-for-an-eye justice in 2012, when said he would reduce a 13-year-old girl’s sentence if her mother agreed to chop off her ponytail in the courtroom, and asked her to keep chopping to the satisfaction of the complainant.

Maybe there’s a reason we don’t rely on Old Testament justice anymore.

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer was quick to voice his support for the judge’s ruling, raving about the “sexual purity” and “sexual integrity of our children” on his show Thursday, and affirming he was “100 percent standing behind” Johansen.

“We should never countenance policies that place children in same-sex households,” Fischer said, repeating the same debunked studies that Judge Johansen presumably invoked.

That would probably be enough to land Fischer on the list this week, however…

Next: Bryan Fischer

Update: Judge Johansen amended his decision Friday, saying that the DCFS did not have to take the infant child away from Hoagland and Peirce next week, as originally ordered. There is still a custody hearing scheduled for Dec. 4.

1. Bryan Fischer

BrianFischerThe folks at the American Family Association uploaded video of Bryan Fischer’s taping of his Wednesday radio show under the header “Wars with other nations not just military conflict but spiritual warfare.”

Talk about burying the lede. Don’t sell yourselves short, AFA. The torrent of verbal ipecac flowing from Fischer’s mouth this week is so much more revolting than that.

Fischer discusses the story of Babylon sacking Jerusalem, as told in the Book of Jeremiah. In Fischer’s gloss, the story of a pagan nation that became an instrument of God’s wrath has special bearing for modern-day America, because like Jerusalem of 587 B.C.E., we too have experienced a smiting in the form of an invasion of godless infidels. Fischer is referring, of course, to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which he characterizes as God’s “wake-up call” to a “Christian nation” to get its act together.

Fischer continued:

I believe — I’m not saying that I know this — God hasn’t told me this one way or another, but I think it’s possible that 9/11 was exactly that. That was God using an utterly pagan, godless, demonic religion and the followers of that utterly pagan, godless, and demonic religion to discipline a Christian nation that has entered into a covenant relationship with God. It’s God’s way of giving us a wake-up call and it’s god’s way of demonstrating that He will not be mocked…

Needless to say, there is no section of any U.S. history textbook (outside of Texas, anyway), which tells the story of how the founders entered into a covenant with the Christian God. But that’s small change — just a few weeks ago, Fischer actually argued that the Constitution gave states free rein to bulldoze mosques.

Number the stars, Bryan. So shall your fallacies be.

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Image: US Department of Energy via Wiki

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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Horrors! There Are Muslims Among Us

Horrors! There Are Muslims Among Us

For an object lesson in how social media can create a tempest in a teapot, look no further than Wichita State University in Kansas.

Six months ago, the university renovated a nondenominational chapel on campus so that it could more easily accommodate prayer by Muslim students. Essentially, pews were removed (replaced by stackable chairs) so that prayer carpets could be spread on the floor.

The alteration was uncontroversial … until an alumna of the university caught wind of it and bewailed the indignity on Facebook. “The Muslims are ecstatic,” she posted, according to the Wichita Eagle. “Sumpin’ NOT right here.”

Other alumni escalated the issue, and in short order the university’s president agreed (in a Facebook post) to revisit the decision to remove the pews.

It took six months for the now furious alumni to learn of the changes, raising questions about just how invested they are in the chapel and the religious life of the student body.

The alumna who started the furor is now declining interviews, but for a while she continued to post comments such as, “God will always trump allah” (sic).

She’s likely unaware that the “Allah” is Arabic for God. And, given other posts, it’s doubtful she’s waded into the deep theological discussions. Rather, what we have here is a Christian who demands that every public space be accommodating to Christians, first and foremost, and that everyone else needs to stand back. It’s all about feelings — her own.

“Again, it was NEVER just about the pews,” she wrote in another post. “It was WHO/WHAT caused them to be removed and the affect it will have on non-muslims.”

It should also be underscored that Christian students who used the chapel also favored taking out the pews to make the space more inviting to Bible study groups and interfaith events. The request came through the student government association.

As news of the imbroglio spread, Fox News got in on the act. A columnist on its website called the chapel renovation “Christian cleansing.”

“This is what the Islamic transformation of a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values looks like, folks,” wrote Todd Starnes. “The Christian faith is marginalized while the Islamic faith is given accommodation.”

Why not accommodate Muslims at Wichita State? They number about 1,000 out of the nearly 15,000 student body. As the Wichita Eagle also explained, most of the foreign Muslim students pay three times the tuition rates of in-state students.

For some, every accommodation of other faiths (or of those of no faith) is an affront to their own. Christians are not the only offenders in this regard.

Patterns of belief and worship change, and that can be hard to accept, but that change has been going on for a long time. In cities across America, there are predominantly African-American Christian churches that have stained glass windows and other remnants from the time when those spaces were Jewish synagogues. The congregations changed as Jewish populations moved further away from urban neighborhoods.

God is no less present because of the shift in believers.

Wichita State’s Harvey D. Grace Memorial Chapel was never intended to be only for Christian students, although revisionist arguments are being made now. The chapel was a gift to the university by the namesake’s widow, dating back to 1964. A “nondenominational” worship space back then more than likely had a Christian context. These days, on virtually any state university campus you will meet many Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.

But Muslims are the focus here. Given what’s happening in the world, some regard any Muslim as a potential threat, whether they are a foreign student, a U.S. citizen by birth or a refugee in crisis. And it’s not only in Kansas that people think this way.

The week the Wichita State story broke, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was chastising Eastern European governments for letting Islamophobia undercut humanitarian outreach efforts to Syrians escaping turmoil and now streaming across Europe.

Obviously, alumni of any university or college have an important role to play. They have a vested interest in the stability of their alma mater. But alumni who are good stewards understand that they shouldn’t meddle by imposing their prejudices.

As Wichita State President John Bardo wrote, “Our goal should be exactly what Mrs. Grace set out to do in her gift, to have an all faiths chapel that is welcoming to all religious groups on campus.”

Now there is an example of a generous gift that had some foresight toward the future.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

Photo: Jimmy Emerson, DVP via Flickr