Do Not Tell Glenn Beck About This!

Researching these posts, I'm always coming across interesting and potentially useful curiosities.    One which I found this week, I'd never known before, and that is in the frieze above the, uh,  "Justices" in the Supreme Court, along with such lawgivers as Moses and Charlemagne is a representation of Muhammad. While that was he object of a request by some Muslims to have it removed, this article claims that other Muslims, previously, saw it as an honor.   This article goes on to point out that attitudes and beliefs among Muslims dealing with images of Muhammad have not been monolithic or set in stone.

I have to wonder if Pam Geller and Franklin Graham know about this, as well as those who are all whipped up into a swivet about sharia law being foisted onto us. It is a fact that is ripe for promoting their kind of paranoid conspiracy filled thinking, the kind of stuff I heard some of the nuttier people around here firmly believed, like the little teensy "JS" under Roosevelt's image on the dime stood for Joseph Stalin.  Yes, we have those kind of right-wing nut cases in "liberal" New England, too, no area of the country is exempt from right wing insanity.

Also downright weird, or maybe weird or maybe confirmatory are some of the others in the frieze - which I won't post an image of  -  such repulsive figures as Lycurgus who made Sparta a brutal, violent military despotism,  Draco whose brutal, vicious, homicidal legal code is probably the fondest dream of some of our worst "Justices",  Augustus, whose rule decisively ended the Roman republic and began the empire which carries the lesson that a non-democratic, non-egalitarian republic will probably always end up a corrupt, massively violent and depraved empire.   Considering that one of the roles in real history instead if sanctimonious declaration of the Supreme Court in most of its history has been to prevent democracy happening, to prevent its necessary prerequisites like people being accurately informed about political and other aspects of reality, maybe they were winking and nodding when they approved of those things.   I think the building would have been bad enough, with its kind of creepy neo-classical style, without those decorations.