Duck for flying babies

It's been hard to avoid the recent onslaught of flying babies. Bathwater is being tossed in monsoon-like proportions, and cannonades of proverbial tots are getting pitched right with it. Legislators, columnists and citizens alike are guilty of creating the torrents, and forecasters say it just won't stop until people learn to distinguish one issue from another.\nPeople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has started one such flood as only it can. Their latest project, "Holocaust on your plate" compares mass farms and slaughterhouses to Nazi concentration camps and includes photographic displays of both. Naturally, many find this illustration to be an outrageous and inappropriate tool of persuasion. The Anti-Defamation League and others already have publicly decried the campaign.\nFortunately, most people tailor their criticism to fault PETA for what it so often is -- irrational extremists. However, others who question PETA's latest antics incorrectly assume that it's also time to question something else: the concept of vegetarianism. \nThere goes the baby. \nWhen PETA conveys its message in an offensive manner, criticism should attack only their methods. When you mess with vegetarianism, you mess with far more than PETA. Most people who choose to abstain from animal products aren't staging public protests. They are acting on a personal choice. So unless someone is actively shoving tofu down your throat, there's no need to challenge a vegetarian's decision. \nApparently, a Washington state lawmaker has an even larger infant to throw. Republican Lois McMahan chucked the entire religion of Islam when she left the floor of the Washington House of Representatives last Monday during a Muslim-led morning prayer.\n"It's an issue of patriotism," McMahan told The Associated Press. "Even though the mainstream Islamic religion doesn't profess to hate America, nonetheless it spawns the groups that hate America."\nThe prayer requested Allah's blessing and guidance in the House, and explicitly called for America's success in the war against terrorism. \nStill, McMahan said she considers Islam to be "the focal point of the hate-America sentiment in the world."\nAnother baby thrown down.\nPresident Bush himself describes Islam as a practice in which billions of people in the world can find comfort, solace and peace. But McMahan is ready to ostracize an entire religion over a subset of radical members. Would she have also marched out during a Catholic prayer when priests were under fire? Does she consider Catholicism to be "the focal point of pedophiliac sentiment in the world?" \nThe State Department estimates there are six million American Muslims living in the United States. They alone should be enough to counter McMahan's alleged "focal point." And condemning their beliefs in a country where we celebrate a freedom of religion can hardly be considered "patriotic."\n We cannot judge groups or ideologies by the black sheep and mutant ideas they "spawn." We don't blame pop music for generating a star who wears a prosthetic nose and runs a little boy ranch. We can't hold the Republican party responsible every time Rush Limbaugh calls a senator "Lucifer." And we haven't denounced Canada just because they thrust Celine Dion upon us. \nWhy? Because these things aren't fair representations of their respective groups. Like the groups in the aforementioned situations, they are simply extreme examples of what is usually a more competent whole. Any person or group can expect to be held accountable for their words and actions. But when an issue does come in to scrutiny, attacks should focus on the matter at hand. Get rid of the dirty water. But leave the kids in the tub.