The US is not a Muslim country. I’m not talking about Muslims in a Muslim country or Jews in Israel. I’m talking about the US, which this article is about.

In general, Muslims don’t. Only the extremely conservative ones do.

Many religions have conservative factions that think that their religious laws should also be general laws.

Muslim religious law, just like Jewish religious law, only applies to people of their faith. For most people in their faith, the religious law is only applied in religious settings. It is independent of non-religious law because both religions realize that not everyone belongs to their faith. It’s only when you get zealots that you get the idea that everyone has to follow the religious laws.

It’s only Christianity that tries to force non-Christians to live by Christian rules, whether it’s businesses closed on the Christian Sabbath (something that’s waned in the past 50 years, but I can recall it being hard to find stores open on Sunday in the 1980s), laws about women’s reproduction rights (outside of extremists, Judaism is pro-abortion) as well as gender and sexuality, and protests over absurd things like the words “happy holidays.”

I’ve yet to see Jewish people protesting that bacon is sold at Kroger or Muslim people demanding that they’re wished Eid Mubarak.

A few years back, there was a short-lived site that attempted to be a better site like Reddit. Unfortunately, they started up around the time that The_Dipsht and alt-reich subreddits were starting to get quarantined. Amusingly, many of them tried to move to Voat, who by then had become so toxic that they were called poseurs and told to go away.

So they showed up at the door of the new site - who handled them very gracefully. There were suddenly a pile of alt-reich white supremacy communities on the site. The admins basically told them and their creators, “Gee, thanks for stopping by. We’re so glad you thought of us. Here’s your hat. Sorry you can’t stay longer. Bye now, have a nice day!” and deleted all the communities, the people who created them, and those who had subscribed. And that was that.

Unfortunately, people weren’t yet fed up enough with Reddit and the new site didn’t get enough people to stick around. It was a lovely little place, not unlike what Beehaw is trying to do.

Thank you.

I know what it’s like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It’s nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.

Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There’s no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.