I came away from this Washington Post piece with a renewed respect for Grover Norquist:
Conservative activist Grover Norquist says the American Conservative Union must take tougher action and ban a Florida vendor — who sold anti-Muslim material at the group’s Conservative Political Action Conference last week — from future conventions.
Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, e-mailed fellow ACU board members this week, calling for a resolution apologizing “for the discomfort and insult that these offensive materials caused.”
He also said a CPAC panelist, Frank J. Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy, had impugned the patriotism of a Muslim who works at the White House, because of his religion. Gaffney was formally uninvited from Norquist’s “center-right coalition meeting” Wednesday — the weekly lunch for conservative A-listers.
Norquist, regardless of what many on the left think of his kickass organization – Americans for Tax Reform – is a man of principle and previously stood up against religious bigotry in one of Ellen Ratner's WorldNetDaily commentaries. Norquist let loose with both barrels on Ratner and Co. for insinuating their was something wrong with allowing ATR to rent out space to a Muslim organization and that he was raking in large sums of cash from Middle Eastern sources. Grover, clearly angry, mentions the rent issue:
The Islamic Institute rents space from Americans for Tax Reform – as do several groups. In the past, I have given free office space to Toward Tradition, an orthodox Jewish group run by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Anyone who doesn't like the religion of people I rent to can go to Hell.
What Ratner attempted to do in her commentary was no better than the vendor's selling of those horrible buttons at the CPAC. Unfortunately, she gets a free pass in medialand due to her political ideology.
I emailed Grover shortly after he'd posted his reponse to Ratner and gave him my vote of confidence. His response to my email indicated that he was clearly still pissed off at the bigoted implications that Ratner had carelessly repeated.
If I were him, I think I'd still be pissed.