The Pendragon's Hall

George Weigel has an excellent article in Commentary Magazine about the two culture wars facing Europe. As much as the current debate on immigration has taken the sky-is-falling sort of attitude in the US, Europe is actually faced with the destruction of its civilization. Here in the US, the Pendragon supports wholeheartedly any immigration proposal that will have as its final goal the integration of the immigrant with American society. This is the only way we can avoid the dissolution of our society on the order of Europe: immigrants must be encouraged to come and join us. There must be an easy way for them to do this. But this must always include subjection to our laws, and no separate law to appeal to. Weigel talks about sharia law complexes in France in particular but all over Europe where the rape victim pays the ultimate penalty and female circumcision is practiced. This must never happen here. The United States needs to do what historian John Lewis Gaddis suggests in Surprise, Security and the American Experience and acknowledge a certain moral ambiguity about our country: being American does not make something right, but being American also does not make it wrong. The fact that Americans in the past enslaved Africans and persecuted Indians must not give Muslims or any other immigrant group the right to do it today. And America's dominant Judeo-Christian culture is not going to play dead for anyone. This is who we are and how we got this way; if people don't like it, they can stay where they are comfortable. That's fine. Immigration should be relatively easy in this country and immigrants should be welcomed from everywhere. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free....I lift my lamp beside the golden door." But this does not mean that they get to come here and make the United States greater Mexico or greater Japan or greater Jordan. They come to be Americans and this, in the end, is what they must become.