This spring, Indiana’s Republican Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith called Islam “a demonic death cult” and said Americans needed “permission to hate again.” The phrasing, at least as excerpted, was unfortunate, and the backlash has been as expected. Several Muslim advocacy groups have called Beckwith’s comments “dangerous” and “hateful.”
But it is worth asking what he was reaching for, because the impulse beneath the words is not imaginary or shameful. Americans sense, correctly, that some systems in the world aspire to unmake the freedoms that protect them and their children, and that a free people is entitled to say so plainly and to resist.
