Goodhue: Boycott Florida, not Lowe's!

The Rev. Thomas W. Goodhue is executive director of the Long Island Council of Churches.

Recently the chain store Lowe's caved into bigots from the Florida Family Association and pulled its ads from the TV program "All-American Muslim." The show, broadcast on TLC, apparently has the audacity to portray our Muslim neighbors as normal Americans.

I decided to launch a boycott of the home improvement company. That, or demand that at least it change its motto to something more honest. Perhaps "Let's trash someone together."

Let me admit at the outset that I already personally boycott all so-called reality shows. OK, on occasion my wife convinces me to watch an episode of "The Amazing Race" or "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." But it is hard to imagine that the God-fearing Christians of Pensacola watch any of this dreck in the first place. Come to think of it, spending too much time viewing "reality" shows probably just serves to take you further away from reality.

But before I could get my Lowe's boycott under way, I remembered the self-ordained preacher in Florida who burned the Quran not long ago. That turned out to be al-Qaida's biggest recruiting boost since our invasion of Iraq.

Then I recalled a schlocky wax sculpture art show I visited in the Sunken Gardens during a trip to St. Petersburg. It was called "Moments with the Master," and Jesus and his apostles were all depicted as Teutonic blonds -- even the sheep had blue eyes -- except for one stereotypically Jewish-looking disciple at the Last Supper. Can you guess which one? Judas. If you displayed this sort of anti-Semitic "art" on Long Island, I am confident, we would surround the building with torches and pitchforks. Or worse -- we'd attack the artist with dozens of lawyers.

There are bigoted people everywhere, of course, and tragic examples of bias here on Long Island. But Florida seems to have generated more than its share of intolerance lately. Maybe what we should object to would be a television series that presents Floridians as normal Americans. Maybe those conspiracy theorists are right, and they really are putting something in the water down there!

The irony is that Muslims have been in the United States longer than the ancestors of David Caton, the brains behind the Florida Family Association. Residents of the Sunshine State like to point out that St. Augustine was founded before Jamestown, but the first European colony in what is now the U.S.A. was San Miguel de Guadalupe -- a short-lived effort by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in South Carolina in 1526, a century before my Puritan ancestors landed in Massachusetts. He brought African slaves, many of them Muslims, to build his colony, but the Africans soon rebelled. The rebels drove their masters back to Hispaniola and joined the Cofitachiqui, one of the era's most powerful and advanced native societies, who apparently preferred the Africans as neighbors over their former masters.

Even in the British colonies, the number of Africans brought to the British colonies in chains during the 200 years after the founding of Jamestown was three times greater than the number of Europeans who emigrated voluntarily. At least a quarter of these Africans, it has been estimated, were Muslims.

When did your ancestors land here?

I must admit that boycotting Florida wouldn't be any major sacrifice for me personally. I was there once in April, and it was already too hot, and I suspect that God didn't intend us to live anywhere that gets hit with five hurricanes a year. Nearly all my parishioners who ever moved there returned to the Island as soon as they could.

And anyplace that tolerates religious prejudice and defames my fellow citizens because of their faith just isn't American enough for me.