Racial and religious intolerance have been the hallmark of many of President Obama’s critics since the time he first announced his candidacy for the Presidency.? Suppose the right wing birthers and haters are correct, and President Obama is a secret Muslim.? Just how would this great and diverse land, that we lovingly call America, react?
Earlier this week, at a rally in Houston, GOP and Teabully favorite, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, appeared to blame the problems with the Healthcare.gov website on Nigerian email scammers. ? The Houston Chronicle quoted Cruz as saying, ?You may have noticed that all of the Nigerian email scammers have become a lot less active lately.? Senator Cruz continued to say;
?They all have been hired to run the Obamacare website.?
Perhaps Senator Cruz is an outlier, whose comments do not typify the opinion and the behavior of other elected and unelected GOP/Teabully officials and media personalities.
No, there are others.? Consider the comments by Congressman Doug Lamborn, a Republican representing Colorado’s 5th District, who said the following during a radio interview given to a Denver radio station in late July, 2011;
?Now I don’t want to even have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby.”
The good people in Colorado Springs sent the Congressman back to the US House of Representatives in 2013. Consider the news yesterday from the senior Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, who has revealed last Sunday that during the negotiations over the recent GOP/Teabully driven Government Shutdown, a top GOP House leader told President Obama, ?I cannot even stand to look at you.?
The President denies the remark, perhaps not having heard it. But the Daily Kos confirms the statement was also heard by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, coming from Republican Congressman Pete Sessions.
We should also not forget Republican Congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina, 2nd District, who shouted at the President during a speech to Congress broadcast?nationwide shouted out, ?You lie!?
The list of slurs, insults, and outbursts of disrespect from Republican elected officials goes on, and on, and on.
Now we do know that Senator Cruz, despite his Canadian Birth Certificate, is?believed by many to be a Teabully favorite for the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination.?Will Senator Cruz face the same issue as President Obama, who has produced a Birth Certificate showing that he was born in the State of Hawaii?
Senator Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, residing there with his American born mother and his Cuban born father, until the family moved to the United States, when the young Ted Cruz was four years old.??It certainly does seem that there is a better case to be made against the eligibility of Senator Cruz for the office of the Presidency than there ever was for then Senator Obama.? The question is will this lead to the same sort of fervent opposition by the GOP/Teabully Party as it was and still is for President Obama?
The country having fought the Civil War and ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that followed, has the Constitution on his side concerning the eligibility and the right of Barack Hussein Obama to be President of the United States.? The President also has former colleague, and opponent for President in 2008, Senator McCain, on his side.
We all remember that town hall style meeting when McCain, responding to one man said that Senator Obama was, ?A decent person and a person you do not have to be scared as President of the United States.?
When a woman said,?He’s an Arab,” McCain replied,?No ma’am, he’s a decent family man citizen.?
Now that the President is finishing the first year of his second term, his religion is no longer relevant to pollsters.? Still, the last polls conducted, before the 2012 election, showed that 30% of all Conservatives believed that the President was a Muslim, and that an astonishing 31% of all respondents did not know what religion the President practiced.
Given that Article VI of the US Constitution provides that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States, what would be the harm if the President were to admit that he were of the Islamic Faith?? After all, Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, has been serving since 2007 and he is a Muslim.? How would America react to such news?
An interesting question. How would someone like noted Obama hater, Glen Beck react? Beck was raised Catholic, then converted to Mormonism in 1999 and then recently announced his conversion to something called ?Chrislam?, which he says is some sort of combination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
If Mr. Beck, who presumably considers himself a good American, can pick and choose what religion he practices, repeatedly changing, even making up his faith, what would be the harm if the President of the United States were to tell us that yes, it is true, he is a Muslim?? Wouldn?t that, not only be permissible under the Article VI of the Constitution, but also be?cause for celebration of the intention of the founding fathers to have such great foresight, and confirm the right under the First Amendment to the US Constitution?
And what is it about the hatred that some Americans have towards Islam as well as others who are not of a Christian faith?? Do they not realize that, of the almost 7 billion souls presently occupying the planet, the third largest religious group are those folks claiming no religion? While Christianity is the world’s largest religious faith with 32% of the population, Islam is second at 23%. They are a significant group of people that we must learn to deal with.
The founding fathers knew that America was not going to be a popularity contest when they put so many of the good things into the Constitution and into the Bill of Rights.? Yes, they did miss a few things such as not considering African Americans full and free citizens with equal rights, including the right to vote, and similarly treating women as second class citizens.? Through war, through Constitutional Amendment, and through the passage of time, we, the people, got those errors corrected.
This is the United States of America, a Constitutional Republic, and we should be quite glad that there is no religious test for any public office, Federal, State, or local.? We should be quite glad that we are free from the Government establishment of a religion, of any religion, and that we are free to practice, or not, the religious faith of our own selection.? Even if over time, as we see with Glen Beck, we pick three.
So, here it is, let’s assume that this President is a Muslim.? How does America react?
With celebration and with respect.? We are living the American experience as intended and we can soon look forward to the day when we will elect the first female, and the first Jewish, and the next Catholic, and the first Atheist, and dare I say it, the first LGBT President of this great land that we all love.
2014, vote, because it really does matter.
Edited by SS
