This week, USA Today -- as they do with surprising frequency -- published a highly progressive op-ed piece. This one, by Jonathan Turley, is titled The truth about oaths:
Judging from the outcry, one would think that Ellison wanted to use the January edition of Penthouse. America's permanently angry class of religious zealots has organized protests. Some have called for a law requiring that all members use the Bible - regardless of whether they believe a single word in it. They do not expect Ellison's conversion, they just want him (and presumably the two new Buddhist members) to pay tribute to their faith system.
President Bush has not addressed the controversy, even though it was started by one of his appointees - a rabid talk show host named Dennis Prager whom Bush appointed to the prestigious United States Holocaust Museum Board.
Now here's the kicker:
Bush's silence is curious given his tireless campaign against "Islamofascists," extremists who seek to force people to conform to their Islamic faith. In this age of hyphenated fascism, what do we call Jews or Christians who want to force non-believers to swear to the Bible? Judeo-Christofascists?
Of course, the comparison with Islamofascists might not be fair - to Islamofascists. Take the quintessential, Bush-certified Islamofascist regime of Iran. Under Article 3 of the Iranian Constitution, "members representing minority religious groups will take the oath mentioning their own holy books."
It appears that though the Iranian government denies the Holocaust and calls for the eradication of Israel, it views Prager's idea of requiring people to swear to someone else's faith to be ... well ... extreme. (Iran's parliament has had a Jewish member, Morris Motamed, for years - though the Jewish population is about 25,000 out of 70 million). Various experts on Iran told me that such tailoring of oaths to religions goes back to early Islam. Indeed, Tehran University professor Hossein Bashiriyeh explained that "an oath taken with a holy book other than one's own cannot be religiously and morally 'binding.' ... In effect it will amount to not taking an oath at all."
The rest of the piece recounts the familiar details of the case -- the historically wide variation in how federal officials have been sworn in (with and without the scriptures of their choice), and the hyperventilations of the Christianist/nationalist right. It concludes thusly:
Just as fascism is the ugly face of nationalist politics, Judeo-Christofascism is the ugly face of faith-based politics. When Ellison takes the oath with his hand on Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Quran, he will reaffirm our most basic values as a country and, in a single elegant moment, defeat those who use but do not live the tenets of faith.
Nice to see one of the country's largest newspapers letting an opinion columnist call a spade a spade.