For Every Koran Burned By Florida Church, MRFF Will Donate a New One To Afghan Army

It’s very similar to a tactic that’s been used a number of times to shut down public protests staged by preacher Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church – for every person Phelps brings to one of his protests, opponents of Phelps and his virulently antigay agenda agree to donate a specific amount of money to groups fighting for gay rights. So the more people Westboro “God hates fags” Baptist can marshal for a rally the more money goes to help fight for the rights of the people whom Phelps and Westboro hate.

So, can the tactic also work to curb the incitement of hatred against Muslims and Islam?

There’s widespread fear that a Koran-burning stunt scheduled by Florida’s Dove World Outreach Center, a rightwing evangelical church located in Gainesville, will anger Muslims to the point that the lives of American troops in Afghanistan will be in danger. General Petraeus has said just that and condemned the Dove Center’s planned burning of Islamic holy scripture.

Dove’s planned action, of course, amounts to constitutionally protected speech. Enter Mikey Weinstein’s Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

As Chris Rodda, Head Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation describes, MRFF (which protects the rights of America’s armed services members to be free from unwanted evangelizing in the military and for their right to believe what they want to believe),

After being contacted by scores of its active duty military clients asking the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to do something in response to Terry Jones’s planned “Burn A Koran Day,” MRFF has decided that the most appropriate response would not be to try to stop Jones, but to donate to the Afghan National Army, as a gesture of good will and a statement of opposition to this entirely un-American act of religious bigotry, a new Qur’an for each one destroyed by Jones and his followers.

The following will run as a full page ad in the Gainesville Sun on Friday.