Golden Rule aside...

The Vatican today reminded Muslim nations PO'd over a cartoon of their own treatment of Christian minorities.

"If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us," Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's Secretary of State (prime minister), told journalists in Rome. "We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts," Foreign Minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo told the daily Corriere della Sera.

That's putting it mildly. If they have a right to a planet free of any material offensive to their religion, then Catholic priests have a right not to be murdered in Turkey? Let's not sell ourselves short here. Just under a year ago, forty Christians were arrested in Saudi Arabia for praying in a private home. Christians in Palestine are routinely persecuted for their beliefs. Not even their cemeteries are safe. British flight crews aren't even allowed to bring crosses or St. Christopher medals into Saudi Arabia, let alone wear them. Yet were any of these practices reflected upon in the Muslim world during the international uproar over France's law against wearing crosses or hijabs in public schools? Hardly. But Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority did declare the ban an "infringement on human rights" and assert that efforts to allow women to mix more freely with men were "satanic and dangerous" in the same breath.

It's interesting. Practically every religion in the world abides by some variation of the Golden Rule. Islam is the glaring exception.

It shows.