Muslim Congressman-elect Keith Ellison is officially totally awesome.

Republican bigots called Ellison's plan to be sworn in on a scripture that actually means something to him "a threat to American values". And at least one "integral" blogger agreed. So Ellison is using a copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Owned seems to be the operative word here.

The people who followed Prager's and Goode's line of reasoning -- that America is an essentially Judeo-Christian nation, that our struggle against terrorism is actually a struggle against Islam, and thus that any compromise with foreign culture must be resisted, have unwittingly followed Bin Laden's plan. It is Bin Laden who wants to start a war between two cultures, and it is the Bush Administration who have enabled Bin Laden to succeed. Treating terrorists as representatives of a civilization or of a religion rather than as criminals, apart from being bigotry, plays directly into the hands of terrorists.