These truths, evident Yesterday... election day... Like many virtuous and civic-minded citizens I cast my vote - our little and bizarre tradition, overturning the government every two years - yet despite with my best efforts the Republican Party has captured the United States House of Representatives and Senate. I want to use a swear word right now. I don't understand Republicans and I don't understand their policies; that's not to say I don't understand their goals and objectives: I do. However, I can't stand what they represent. I cannot tolerate those who deny women control over their bodies, deny homosexuals the legally recognized right to love. I can't understand who would cut taxes on the super-rich, creating Jazz Age class divisions that separate citizens with insurmountable walls of money. But despite my distaste for most things conservatives stand for, I can't push them away. President Bush currently holds a 63% approval rating among the American public, and I do not choose to believe that 63% of my country's citizens are stupid. And despite the way I complain, I really sit here and rant. My problem stems from the fact that everything these religious fanatics hold sacred is radically in conflict with every belief I hold sacred and dear. Salman Rushdie knows a thing or two about religious fanaticism. After the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Indian writer received more than the usual protest from the religious far right. Objecting to the negative portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the Quran, the holy book of Islam, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called on all righteous Muslims to execute the book's writer and publisher. For more than a decade, Rushdie hid from publicity and assassinations, all because of his defamations of so-called “sacred” texts. It is reasonable to assume that Rushdie has a rather strong opinion of what is declared sacrosanct. In 1990, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London invited the Booker Prize-winning novelist to deliver the prestigious Herbert Reed Memorial Lecture; those who protected him decided that he should not go himself. Perhaps not being “able to get back into [his] old life, even for such a moment” (Rushdie 340), fueled Rushdie's rhetoric; whatever the cause, the occasion gave rise to an angry lecture: "Is nothing sacred?" In this speech, Rushdie discusses his views on the vitality and importance of literature and whether it is, presumably like religion, intrinsically sacred..