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quote icon Here is my first question: Are you really willing to reject your country's Constitution, which could not be clearer about the illegality of barring entry on the basis of religion, because you are afraid of an entire category of human beings that accounts for about 1/5 of the world's population? Here is my second question: Are you really willing to give the terrorists of the world exactly what they want, and validating the reasons that they have been blowing stuff up, which is an America willing to abandon its own openness and Enlightenment values and become more like the authoritarian societies that they are trying to create? Do you really not understand that the goal of terrorism is to force the United States and Western Europe to give up the principles that we tout as superior to authoritarian extremism so that the people of the world will not see any essential difference between their societies and ours? Terrorism is not a religion or a nationality, or a kind of person. It is a strategy designed to produce an effect. And the effect that it is trying to produce is a harsh response against all Muslims-which then becomes a way to alienate whole populations, not just from the United States, but from the whole set of values that we say we stand for: openness, tolerance, freedom of worship, scientific progress, rational discourse. The whole point of terrorism is to force us to respond less like ourselves and more like the terrorists. When we do this, we eliminate the very difference that we are trying to assert. I am a fifth-generation Latter-day Saint and a tenth-generation American. I love my country and it's constitution, and I revere my faith and my ability to exercise it freely. I have also spent every Friday afternoon during Ramadan praying with my Muslim friends at our local mosque, and every Saturday evening eating delicious food with them at a community iftar. they are kind, generous, decent people who have never treated me or any other visitor with anything but respect and profound gratitude for taking the time to get to know them. They are also deeply patriotic Americans, many of whom left their countries precisely because they knew they would be more free in ours. I cannot tell you how painful it is to hear people generalize about and thoughtlessly criticize my friends, who have treated me with great kindness, because they claim the right to do what all Americans are guaranteed the right to do, which is worship without fear of persecution. And now, because of their faith and our current administration, many of them cannot leave the country to visit their relatives, or invite their relatives to visit them, or move with the same freedom that other legal residents of our country can move with, I work at a university with a large population of Muslim students, and, in our May graduation, we had dozens of parents who wanted to come to see their children graduate but could not. It was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced. The travel ban is immoral and unAmerican. The persecution of Muslims is a betrayal of everything we stand for and everything we say makes us better than the countries that people are fleeing in order to come here. And there is no doubt in my mind that Carolyn is doing the work of God.
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