Being politically incorrect

This morning's NYT includes a well-intentioned but clueless editorial equating wariness about Islamism with homophobia. The Times, bastion of free speech that it is, has so far declined to accept the comment that Your Humble Correspondent submitted in response to that editorial. So here it is. (I've corrected a couple of typing errors that slipped in during a rather hurried composition.) Edit, 10/28: comment was in fact published later in the day.

Muslim communities display zero tolerance for women who have the misfortune to be born to Muslim families and who wish to exercise any freedom in their own lives. The Muslim "honor" murders of Aqsa Parvez in Toronto and Amina and Sarah Said in Texas are only the best-known examples of thousands of young women in north America who are brutalized, threatened, and/or intimidated into unwanted arranged marriages by their Muslim families and the insular, self-referential Muslim community.

Homosexuals and those who wish to leave the Islamic religion fare no better when subjected to the dictates of a religion which prescribes murder as the "remedy" for both.

I am a strong proponent of the first amendment and all associated freedoms. But I cannot read an article like this without noting that there's a big difference between homosexuals, who mostly just want to be left alone and have the same rights as everyone else, and a totalitarian religion that openly seeks world domination with absolutely no tolerance granted for the rights of women, homosexuals, or, eventually, nonMuslims.

Yes, the freedom of religion and the freedom to assemble must be respected. But the brutal totalitarianism of Islam, which is deeply ingrained in both its historic culture and its scripture, cannot be permitted to take root and exercise power over the lives of people who do not want to be subject to it, any more than any other abusive religious cult should be permitted to do so. This is the dilemma: how to respect individual religious beliefs, while preventing an insular, totalitarian religion from abusing individuals within its community of followers; how to refrain from exercising state power over religious belief, while preventing an aggressive and brutally domineering religion from gaining the political power to abuse others.