Muslim is the new gay

Yesterday I attended a "No on 8" church service. (Prop 8, as I'm sure you've heard, is a California constitutional amendment saying "marriage is only between a man and a woman" - and whether or not someone believes homosexuality is acceptable, I think it should be unacceptable in a democracy to write something like that into the constitution. Not only is it a removal of rights (instead of constitutional amendments to expand rights, which is more democractic), but it puts a moral code - one that does not represent the diversity of moral codes that exist among the citizens of California - into law. It's the opposite of what democracy is about).
At any rate, just after the service, I worked on some readings for my "Remembering" class. The topic was 9/11 and cultural and social (theological, liturgical, ritual) acts of memorializing, remembering, and telling the story of what happened. It occurred to me, relating my memory of the ways we talked about it in 2001 and continue to refer to it in some national narratives today, that "Muslim" is the new "gay." By that I mean that Muslim is the new epithet to say that someone or something is bad, even though the literal meaning of the word is untrue -- Barack Obama being the most famous example of this. Just like when people used to (and still do) say "that's so gay" when they mean something is unfair, uncool, or stupid. And what about the people who are gay and Muslim?
Okay, so it's not a perfect analogy, but I think it still applies. Why is it that Islam somehow has come to connote untrustworthiness? Part of it is the mistaken notion of "clash of civilizations," that somehow Islam in the Middle East is completely different from Western Christianity (when in fact they originate in the same place). And part of it is the perceived difference between white and brown (though Arab and Euro are both considered Caucasian in the outdated racial classification systems used by the US Census - and in fact Caucasian comes form the Caucasus mountains which are in western Asia, making the whole thing a bit more laughable). And I don't know this for sure, but probably some of it is retained from black-white racial struggle, which involved Black American Muslims and Afro-centric Black Power movements that rejected Christianity as the religion of slave-owners and oppressors.
But here's a reality check: Muslims are part of America. As Colin Powell pointed out so well, Muslims (along with Christians, atheists, Jews, pagans, gays, and more) enlist in the Army. We also built this country together, as citizens and immigrants and laborers and store owners. I'm tired of the division. My challenge is now to do something about it.
I remember the first time I really sat down and talked with a Muslim person (I think I blogged about it - a Black American Muslim veteran at a homeless shelter). I learned that the interweaving of his spirituality and life were not so different from mine. It's overdue time to get real and stop writing off categories of people negatively (including, for me, evangelicals and conservatives). Yesterday at the interfaith "no on 8" service, Jana Drakka (a Buddhist monk whom I greatly admire) quoted Thich Nhat Hanh's "Call Me By My True Names." He points out that "I" am all of us. It is an illusion, a mistake, an act of violence, to separate completely into "us" and "them."