How to Mess up a Saturday Cookout

Steps to throwing a really bad cookout:
1) Cooking Quarans, rather than steak.
2) Televising it.
3) When the President(of the Unites States) asks you to "keep it down," you crank it up to an eleven.
4) Claim the cookout is for really elevated, yet wholly ignorant purposes. (We're grilling to protest Vegan-ism. Woooohoo processed food!)
5) Have more food than people. (50 members of the Church, 200 Quarans to be burned...math. Math. Use it.)
6) Have an unbalanced menu, and imply you won't. (This is the the "Understanding other People's Eating Habits and Choices Grill-out. What's on the menu? Hamburgers. Now shut up and eat.)

What am I talking about? Well. Read on. (No, seriously. Read on. I explain it.)

Talking about religion is something I normally like to avoid. It, much like mobs, hidden sidearms and gun cases (normally refurbished refrigerators with chains around them) frighten me. Oddly enough, if you you're famous (whooo-boy, glad I missed that train) and you talk about religion, good chance that mobs, people with hidden sidearms, and people that own gun fridges, might just come after you. Or at least write you very angry letters. About how they fully intend on coming after you. (So long as their boss gives them Saturday off.)

But when a story like the recent "Quran Burnings" or, at this point, threat of Quaran burnings, comes up, I feel that distinct urge (Journalistic calling?) to get up, drive to the bookstore, sit back down and write something. If you who don't know the story, I'll go ahead and throw down. A man, a preacher (some would say a leader of a Church.) has decided that the best way to honor the memories of those who died on September 11th, 2001, would be to burn a bunch of Quarans, he also wants to protest fundamentalist Islamic culture. (I would use the word incite. But incite, protest, who can tell the difference these days?)

The Reverend in question, Terry Jones of, and I'm not kidding you here with the name of his Church, Dove World Outreach Center, (In some circles known as "The Holy Place of Irony") has now ignored requests from both the White House and General Petraeus, (For those of you out of the know, he's the guy who runs the military in Afghanistan. Not just ours mind you, NATO too.) to not do this. A church of around 50 members (you're not misreading that number) has now incited the anger of a nation, and most likely a large portion of the Muslim faith. (Which is awesome, because there's only like a billion Muslim people in the world. I've always wanted to know what it's like to be hated by around a tenth of the Earth's population.)

I have a litany of issues here, but I'll start with the easiest one. They are aiming this at fundamentalist Muslims. The type who burn American flags and commit suicide in very loud ways on very crowded buses. And I get that they feel something should be done, I feel the same way. But, at what point is burning books the answer? First off, did these people miss the whole Nazi thing? Did they skip history class? Burning knowledge is not the answer. More importantly, what would Christians do, and I'm not talking about your Lone Wolves, or rabid Militant groups that live in the backwoods of Montana (A state mainly known for its frontwoods.) here, I'm talking about your bread and butter, meat and potato, mom and pop Christians, what would they do, if a group of Muslims burned the Bible? (Now this is a weird hypothetical question, as the Bible is generally included as one of the Muslim's holy texts, just not the holy text.) I'm pretty sure that would be a good way to, in Today's lingo, start some shit.

But this, to me, is the most important part. Forget all of the ignorance that it's taking for these people to even come up with this idea. Forget all of the stubbornness it takes to ignore the President and the Government when they condemn your planned actions. That's a lot like your mom disapproving of your girlfriend, and the party you're going to Friday night at the Quad, I get it. No, what kills me is that these people are ignoring the opinions of the man who is leading our troops in the Middle East. The man who is responsible for their lives. If he believes that this could endanger the lives of the over 150,000 soldiers and citizens we have serving over seas, than your 50 person grill-out needs to find a different way to protest.

Support their message, or don't. But when someone knowingly puts a soldier's life in danger, he had better be a commanding officer. These people are a book burning away from going down in history. And not in that "we burn bras (but not really) for women's rights!" kind of way.

And what's worse? They're from Florida. Really? Why can't we catch a break? I promise you (You being the rest of the United States and the World) we aren't all like this. I know, I know. You're thinking, "well what about the Bush election?" And all I can say is that I voted for Kerry on a whim, which at that time, was a huge thing for me. (Voting was a whim in the first place.) At what point did Florida replace Arkansas and Mississippi as the place to go for stupid? Don't take that out of context Mississippians and Arkansans. The rest of the country still knows you're stupid. Now they're just including us too.