To the Editor:

As I was reading this week’s Twin City TIMES, I was struck by the difference in tone between the Rev. Douglas Taylor’s Letter to the Editor and Larry Gilbert’s  “Mayor’s Corner.”

Taylor’s letter (“Fighting for our way of life,” TCT, Sept. 22, 2011, p. 3) has an undertone of hostility toward Muslims in general and speaks of waging war with them without bothering to mention that the overwhelming majority of Muslims have no quarrel at all with, let alone a hatred of, the United States. His implication seems to be the opposite.

Gilbert’s article, on the other hand, offers a far more optimistic and reality-based view of Muslims (in the form of our Somali immigrants), particularly regarding their long-term contributions to our community (“Mayor’s Corner: Recent mass immigration isn’t so recent; it’s 10 years old,” TCT, Sept. 22, 2011, p. 5). He presents them as very much like our own ancestors, people who came here to work, practice their own religion and raise their families.

How soon some of us have forgotten the hatred, racism and general intolerance our immediate ancestors endured. And now some of us rain that same bigotry down on our new Somali neighbors. I ask this question: Who better demonstrates the values of Christianity, Taylor or Gilbert?

And I would like to remind Taylor that our Constitution provides for freedom of religion, and that includes mosques as well as churches.

Edmund P. Burke

Auburn