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Obama Isn't The First U.S. President Accused Of Being Secretly Muslim
That would be Thomas Jefferson.
USA Today
By Stephen Prothero
Posted: 09/23/2015 08:41 PM EDT
"In a Republican primary season that has stoked fears of the undesirables and the undocumented in our midst, it now seems to be the Muslims’ turn.
"Last week, Donald Trump
let slide the comments of a man at a New Hampshire town hall meeting who called President Obama a Muslim, described Muslims as “a problem in this country,” and suggested it was time to “get rid of them.” On Sunday on Meet the Press, Ben Carson
described Islam as inconsistent with the Constitution and said he “absolutely would not agree” with putting a Muslim in the White House.
"When questioned about these controversies, neither man backed down. Trump tweeted that he was not “morally obligated to defend the president.” Carson told The Hill that the next president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Quran.” Repeatedly, Carson raised the specter of Muslims lying about their own faith in order to achieve their political aims — a notion many “birthers” have used to explain how a president who repeatedly calls himself a Christian could somehow be a secret Muslim.
"Unfortunately, none of this is new. Americans like to think of our country as a nation of immigrants and a nation of religions, but repeatedly we have failed to live up to our ideals, banishing fellow citizens from the American family because of their ethnicities or religious commitments.
"Throughout U.S. history, Protestants have denounced Catholics as fake Christians, amoral villains and traitors to the nation. In an argument that anticipated today’s critiques of Islam, inventor Samuel Morse argued in 1835 that the ideal of religious liberty served as a Trojan horse secreting enemies of the nation “into every nook and corner of the land.” This “infallibly intolerant” Roman Catholic tradition, he argued, wasn’t even a religion; it was a nefarious political scheme masquerading as one.
"But anti-Catholicism was not the only culture war prosecuted by conservative defenders of faith and flag. Mormons, too, were targeted as slaves of a religious despot whose liberty was incompatible with our own. Before this culture war was over, Mormon leaders would be sued, jailed, beaten, stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and murdered. And rank-and-file Mormons would be chased from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois to the Utah territory.
"Today, it is easy to imagine that Barack Obama is the first
U.S. president to be accused of being a Muslim. But that honor actually belongs to Thomas Jefferson."
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