How about we have a national holiday celebrating them? I speak, of course, not of the Taliban but of the Pilgrims, America's founding fundamentalists.
This week we are both fighting our war against fundamentalism gone amok and celebrating Thanksgiving, which is in part a tribute to the Pilgrims and their Puritan brethren.
In the short form of the Thanksgiving story, the Pilgrims came to America so they could practice their faith freely--heroes in the cause of religious tolerance.
In fact, while it's true that they left so that they might practice their faith, they were hardly religious pluralists. They left because they were angry that the English church was too Catholic. Once here, the Puritans worked hard to purge the land of those who disagreed.
The Puritans executed several Quakers for their religious beliefs (another two merely had their ears cut off), expelled Roger Williams for his views (he went on to found Rhode Island), and eventually produced the Salem witch trials. G.K.Chesterton wrote that the Puritans "would have died heroically in torment rather than tolerate any religious liberty" and that "the whole Puritan movement...was a struggle against religious toleration."
Sound a little bit like the Taliban?
