Everybody knows that foreigners with their odd rituals and harsh, gutteral intonations are much better for the draconian laws enacted against them and the doors slammed in their faces.

Sure, the Consititution is a pretty piece of speechifying, but forcing people of different creeds and customs to conform to ignorant, xenophobic demands is what Ross’s country is all about!

Betty, I can’t thank you enough, however, for the episode of When Breasts Attack. Those pink pajamas may have looked adorable, but Douthat barely survived the dangers that lurked within. He feels much better now that he’s in a true marriage between an unhappy woman and a closet case. Plus the missus is wonderfully forbearing about his wearing Kevlar to bed.

There’s a fine crop of crazy growing in the comments on that piece. While most of them are negative, the people who want to talk about the “Ground Zero Mosque” are more off than usual. My personal favorite thus far is the guy who seems to be claiming that the institutional discrimination against Muslims in France is part of the European effort to keep Muslims on the “straight and narrow.”

Shorter Ross Douthat: There are two Americas—a Constitutional America that believes American Muslims have the same rights as the rest of us, and a Cultural America that believes the Constitution is as worthless as the “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law” tag on the bottom of a new mattress.

It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well.

But only after beating the shit out of the Jews and the Catholics. And they haven’t let up on the Jews, hence Ross’s need to shout Judeo-Christian! He hopes Jesus will be fooled when He comes back.

The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether, but that’s central to my point.

OK, I stuck on the last bit. But doesn’t he sound exactly like Loadpants? Has anyone ever seen those two in the same room?

OK, I stuck on the last bit.

It’s simple. America isn’t a Constitutional Republic, it’s a Nation of Fraternity By-Laws.

What Douthat is saying is that we’re all technically equal, but there’s an 80-year Hazing Week for new pledges.

I get it. There are two America’s, each as legitimate as the other:

But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic.

It also believes that when Jeebus healed people across the space-time rift it disproved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  It’s just a different kind of physics, one that includes miracles, no better or worse than the physics you learn in your fancy-pants commie schools.

It’s like Physics that speaks English, not Arabic. Except for the numerals.

Also2: Ross is the guy who not once, but twice in a very short period, tried to blame the R.C.C.‘s little baby raping problem on ... the Irish.

So apparently it takes a long-assed time for the 2nd America (of which Ross is so obviously a citizen) to accept auslanders.

Douchie just doesn’t seem to get that it’s the ideals by which the first America lives that allow the other Murka the freedom to live out their prejudices and xenophobia.  Just because people have the right to dislike foreign brown people who have the audacity to speak other languages and practice suspicious religions doesn’t make it a, you know, good thing.  Or something to hold up to admire and emulate.

It is a very strange thing to me that this guy wants to have a job where he routinely sticks up for the rights of people to discriminate against others and tries to do so in what he no doubt considers to be a rational and logical fashion.