(Originally posted on the Bilerico Project, America's best LGBT blog, by Patricia Nell Warren, the New York Times best selling novelist and historian.)
As the U.S. heads into the last frenzied months of Presidential campaigning, attacks on the belief history of Obama's family grow ever fiercer. Right-wing commentators aren't content to question Obama's positioning on his former pastor and former church. They keep hammering on their accusation that Obama is really a secret Muslim. In recent statements, they allege that Obama had a "Muslim upbringing" (Jon Christian Ryter), that his Muslim father was a "radical," an "atheist and polygamist" (WorldNet News), that his mother was a "Unitarian" who turned "atheist as a young adult" (Free Republic).
To hear them talk, you have to wonder how four Unitarian and two Quaker "heretics" ever got elected to the White House.
It's unfortunate that Obama has bobbed and weaved on the family issue. He tries to shade his bio the "right" way, and explains himself endlessly, which only digs him deeper into the quagmire that his enemies are making for him.
Obama might have made a more powerful impression by drawing himself up and saying, "So what if my father was a Muslim? So what if my mom was an atheist? So what if I was enrolled as a Muslim, and learned about Muslim religion, when I was a school kid in Indonesia?"
I could compute a more fearless response like that from Obama. My own parents checked my box as "Presbyterian" in grade school, and I learned all about Presbyterians in Sunday School...but that doesn't make me a card-carrying Presbyterian today.
And don't we Americans supposedly have the right to follow a non-Christian religion or spiritual way if we so choose? Last time I checked, it was even legal to be an atheist in America.
This campaign against Obama and his family is not only despicable - it's un-American in the worst way. And it's proof that many Americans are still stuck in the Dark Ages, where attitudes on office-holding and image are concerned. Today the religious-affiliation rules for Presidents are a lot stricter than they used to be. Abraham Lincoln didn't even belong to a church; if he tried to run today, he'd probably get run out of town. Today a candidate has a shot at the White House only if he or she looks like a squeaky-clean mainline Christian with impeccable family credentials on churchgoing.
Attacking the belief history of your enemy's family is nothing new. So-called "Western Christian civilization" has a long and lurid record of prosecuting the families of prominent but problematical people for their "heresy."
Example: 15th century Spain, when King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabel were paranoid about secret Jews and Muslims. They had ended Muslim occupation of Spain and were uniting the country under Catholic rule. But a percentage of their citizens -- especially certain powerful old families -- were descendants of intermarriage among Christians, Jews and Muslims. These marriages had happened when a tolerant brand of Islam ruled most of Iberia. So in 1481, to deal with the "problem," Ferdinand and Isabel established their own Inquisition in Spain. They used that dreaded ecclesiastical police-force against any families that might challenge their newly-asserted royal power - and didn't hesitate to accuse them of worshiping secretly as Jews or Muslims. Being able to prove the long-time Catholic faithfulness of your entire pedigree became a matter of life and death... and your death happened at the stake, after enough torture to make you confess to anything, and a rigged trial.
Another example: England, where rulers were paranoid about secret Catholics. For several centuries after England went Protestant under Henry VIII, it was a crime to be Catholic. Henry's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, developed a system to weed out anybody and their families who still practiced Catholicism underground. In 1559 "Elizabeth's Supremacy Act" was decreed, requiring that all clergy, judges and office-holders had to swear an oath of loyalty to the queen with their hand on the Bible. Since no Catholic would swear on the Bible in those days, this oath was used to expose closet Catholics.
Moreover, Elizabeth and her advisors assumed that crypto-Catholics were also plotting against the crown. So if you even refused to take the oath, you could be executed as a traitor.
Conservative church-adhering colonists brought these ugly practices to North America and modified them for use in the new republic. I could go on at length about Protestant efforts to keep American Catholics and Jews from holding office -- efforts that lasted well into the 20th century. Few Americans realize that our cherished oath of office, with the hand laid on the Bible, is a transplant of "Elizabeth's Supremacy Act" to the New World. U.S. law requires the oath, but it doesn't specify that the oath must be sworn on the Bible. That would make the oath a religious test and our Constitution forbids religious tests. But the hard-shell church people have succeeded in making swearing on the Bible a tradition that few dare to flout -- it almost has the force of law today. Hence the kerfuffle in 2007 when Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim, swore into office on a copy of the Koran.
Indeed, out of 43 Presidents, the American people have elected only one Catholic, following an uproar over John F. Kennedy's alleged "allegiance" to "a foreign power" called the Vatican. Kennedy managed to look squeaky-clean enough, and made the oath work for him by swearing on a Catholic edition of the Bible. A few Quaker and Unitarian Presidents have squeaked into the Oval Office... but not recently. Meanwhile a Mormon doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell, because the Protestant establishment consider Mormons to be the spawn of Satan. And, despite all we hear about Jewish roots of Christianity and Jesus being a Jew, we've never had a Jewish president... which ought to tell us something about how backwards and bigoted our nation can still be.
So I'm appalled to see Obama being subjected to a classic Inquisition on his family's record of belief. No, his enemies haven't put him on the rack. But they make it painful in other ways.
As I write this, America's grand inquisitors are now attacking Obama's personal brand of Christianity, item by item. Fundie hack Cal Thomas says loftily, "Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn't meet that requirement." Thomas comes off sounding like the French inquisitors who told Joan of Arc that there was a clear requirement to qualify as a woman, namely she had to wear a dress.
Imagine what people like Cal Thomas would do to other Americans if only they enjoyed complete control of the government and the penal system the way they once did in darkest Europe... the way they aim to do again, if they get John McCain into the White House.
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